The Conformity Test

THE CONFORMITY TEST

When I was a kid, I idolized my cousin Shoshana, who was two years older than me and therefore impossibly sophisticated in my eyes. During a family camping trip one summer, she introduced me to a trendy band called New Kids On The Block. As we sat in her tent, listening to their latest album on her cassette player, Shoshana said, “Ooh, this next song is my favorite!”

After the song was over, she turned to me and asked me what I thought. I replied enthusiastically, “Yeah, it’s so good! I think it’s my favorite, too.”

“Well, guess what?” she replied. “That’s not my favorite song. It’s my least favorite song. I just wanted to see if you would copy me.”

I was embarrassed at the time. But in retrospect, it was an instructive experience. When I claimed that song was my favorite, I meant it—the song truly seemed better than the other songs. I didn’t feel like I was just saying so to impress Shoshana. Then, after Shoshana revealed her trick, I could feel my attitude shift in real time. The song suddenly seemed corny. Lame. Boring. It was as if someone had just switched on a harsher light, and the song’s flaws were thrown into sharp relief.

Now I use Shoshana’s trick as a thought experiment when I want to test how much of “my” opinion is actually my own. If I find myself agreeing with someone else’s viewpoint, I do a conformity test: Imagine this person told me that they no longer held this view. Would I still hold it? Would I feel comfortable defending it to them?

For example, suppose you’re in a strategic meeting and your colleague is making the case for hiring more people. You find yourself nodding along in agreement. “That’s true, it would end up saving us money,” you think. That feels like your own opinion—but to check, you can do a conformity test. Imagine your colleague suddenly said, “By the way, everyone, I’m just playing devil’s advocate here. I don’t necessarily believe we should hire right now.”

Hearing that, do you still feel like you’re in favor of hiring?

The conformity test can be used to interrogate your preferences as well as your beliefs. A woman I know in her late twenties was thinking about whether she wanted to have children someday. She had always assumed she would end up being a mother—but did she really want that or was she just going along with what most people do? She tried a conformity test: “Suppose having kids wasn’t the majority choice, and instead only about 30 percent of people wanted to do it. Would I?” In that world, she realized, the idea of having children seemed much less appealing to her. The result highlighted for her that she was less inherently interested in parenthood than she had thought.