Peer pressure

 

There is a common phrase used by people commenting on the social media platform which I left last month. It involves mentioning the 'ratio' on a particular post. By which - if you have never been on Elon's current playground - they mean 'look at the ratio of positive to negative comments'. If most people hate the post then they must be in the wrong. 

To which I reply 'look at the ratio on this guy!' and the picture at the top. Everyone else is doing it so he must be wrong. He was called August Landmesser, by the way, and you can find out what happened to him and why he didn't salute.

But the bigger picture is that peer pressure is a very powerful thing. If everyone else is doing something, it takes a lot of certainty and willpower to not copy them. In fact I rather cruelly (I realise now) did an experiment to show this in a class of 10-year-olds. When one child went out to the toilet, we all put our arm across our chest when he returned, and of course he copied it, as we knew he would. You don't need to know why people are doing something, just that they are all doing it. 

So what peer pressure do we yield to? Even quite good or admirable things become less so when we do them for fear of standing out. Remembrance Day poppies are something that people may be buying from fear of looking out of step with everyone else. Is it more worthy to wear it or to spend more time thinking about the people who died?

I remember when Black Lives Matter was first with us and we had a gathering in our town to protest the killing of George Floyd by a police officer, there was a minutes silence in which the organisers said you could kneel but didn't have to. One by one the youngest people knelt, then some older ones, then a few standouts, then me. And even as I did it, I thought it was not right. I only knelt because everyone else did, so what does that say about how sincere my feelings were?

This is the thing that should worry us when we think about societies that we consider wrong or evil - such as 1930s Nazi Germany. Are we sure we would have done the right thing when everyone else was giving the Hitler salute? Really sure? When our opinions are always keeping a careful eye on those of our friends and contemporaries? There are not many August Landmessers in the world and you would need to be really confident to think that you would step into those shoes. It is always easier to just keep your head down and not stand out.

How can we protect ourselves from this? How can we step back and ask 'Is this what I really believe, or is it just simpler for me than actually working out what I think?' Sometimes it just takes too much time or effort and there are already enough choices to make in life. We can't quiz everything, so why not just assume that majority of our friends counts as good enough? But if we know that peer pressure is so powerful (partly because it is insidious and we don't always clock it as it works) then shouldn't we try equally powerful means to know that we are thinking and not just copying? Someone told me last week that a really good discipline is to look at some of your firmly held beliefs and ask yourself sincerely "But what if I am wrong?" and try to work out the implications. And by doing that you have to think of all the counter arguments that a sincere opponent would make and really look at your thoughts. 

And then if your belief is still firm you have at least the hope that it is driven by something more than what everyone around you is doing.