So, when we talked about creativity with individuals, we talked about the difference between individual habits and deviating from those habits to be creative. Yeah. It turns out there's a team analog to that, which most people refer to as norms, right? Which are shared expectations for how people should behave in groups. What that does is it makes people's behavior predictable, it makes, it uniform, everyone knows what to expect and things sort of run smoothly that way. So, it's like coordination, right? Right. So, if I have a habit to get through this part of my day, if I'm in a team, we have norms to help us coordinate and get something done together. Yeah. So, norms can be incredibly useful and they make teams sort of work efficiently. But as we'll see, norms also, because of this element of social control can also impose limits on the variety of perspectives that people are willing to share. People might join the team as a unique individual with their own perspectives, but teams can actually stamp out that individuality by encouraging people to conform. There is a very famous study that illustrates just how extreme the pressure to conform can actually be. The experiment was conducted by a psychologist named Solomon Asch back in the 1950s. Maybe some of you have heard of it, but for those of you who haven't, I'll run through the details of the study just quickly. He was actually irritated at the time by the prevailing view in the 1950s, which was that people are really sheep that readily conform to the group. They should try to fit in and just follow along. Asch thought that if he could put people in a situation where they could see what's true with their own two eyes, then they might contradict the group if the group is clearly wrong. It turns out that Asch underestimated the power of conformity pressure. In his experiment, he invited people to his lab to participate in a study that was supposedly about visual acuity. Seven people showed up to the study, but it turns out that six of them were actually working for Asch. They were confederates of the experimenter. In a series of repeated trials, he showed people a set of lines just like what you see above and he asked people to match the light on the left to the line that is the same height on the right hand side. Now, if you don't have some kind of visual problem, then this is a no brainer. Indeed, 99 percent of the people who are asked to without any majority pressure from a majority to make that judgment, they got it right. But he set up the experiment, so that each of the six people working for the confederate went first, and they took turns, and they all gave the wrong answer. One by one, they each repeated an answer that was clearly wrong. By the time they got to the last naive subject, this was the person who really didn't know what was going on, there was incredible pressure to just go along with the group and give the wrong answer. It's really fun to look back on the video clips of this original study because you can see people really visually disturbed, upset, sort of looking around like how are they getting this wrong, this is so obvious. But the key thing is that a really very frequently, in fact, 37 percent of the time participants gave the wrong answer at least once despite the fact that they could see the majority was wrong by just looking at the lines. So, rather than disproving the prevailing view, this experiment ended up being a classic demonstration of the power of groups to apply conformity pressure, and to get a lone individual to go against the evidence of their own senses, and adopt the point of view of the majority even when it's clearly wrong. So, are there any good things about conformity? Well, if your goal is to get people to obey, and fall in line, and march efficiently in order, conformity is a great thing. Right. But there's a class on creativity. That's just a little bit different unfortunately. So, it's about coordination. It's about getting along. It's about working together smoothly and that's about creativity. Yeah. Not necessarily. So, I would Aktion cover, which I think is so astounding is how the lengths people will go to, to conform to a majority even when they can see further with their own eyes that it's completely wrong. Yeah, yeah. So, the question is why do people actually do that, right? Right. Right. Yeah. So, there are a couple of reasons. One is just something called informational influence, but that's really just the assumption that the truth lies in numbers. Yeah. That if everyone else thinks the same thing, they're probably right, maybe they know something I don't. Right. Maybe I missed something, maybe I wasn't playing as close attention to the instructions. Yeah. As I could have. So. It's heroistic. Right. I mean, it's a rule of thumb that maybe works sometimes. Right. Well, I don't know. Most people say this, "That's a good bet." Right. Not always a good bet. Not always. But again, when it comes to creativity, people think, well, I have some information to share that's really important, but I'm not going to because I just assume it has to be wrong, because no one else thinks it, and that's really a barrier. Yeah, yeah. In other times, it's the case that people know for a fact the group is wrong. This is a really insidious because I know that I'm right. Yeah. I know the group is wrong, but I don't say anything because I don't want them to dislike me, and I don't want to be outside of the group, and I don't want to be kicked out. I don't want to look weird. So, this is what psychologists call normative influence, but basically, it's just I want to be liked and accepted. Right. So, I know that the group is about to do something incredibly stupid because I see that they're completely wrong and yet, I will remain silent because the group happens to be a place that I like to be. I don't want to get kicked out just yet anyway. Yeah, yeah. So, we have these reasons why even people who know better, even people who have something really great to say won't say it. Because it's not the only issue on the table, it's not just about information. It's called politics, right? Well, and liking. Social community, and being a part of something, and those can trump being creative. Getting good information out. Right. So, we talked a little bit about why individuals conform and there are good reasons for that. There are also things that groups do to really maximize conformity pressure. Part of that has to do with just the size of the majority. There's a lot of research to suggest that the more people there are in the unanimous majority, the more power they have to compel the dissenter to really give up and adopt their perspective, but it really maxes out at five. So, once you're faced with the majority of five, they may as well be 15, 20, 30 people. So, it's really doesn't require a lot to really force people to fall in line. It's surprisingly powerful just at five. Yeah. I imagine that also some groups are maybe more compelling, more I want to be part of it more. Right. So, not only might there be a majority who say things, but this might also be the kind of group that I really want to be a part of. Yeah. So, high status groups, you're not going to say anything because again, it goes back to you want to be liked. Well, I want to be a part of this group, so I'll say whatever you want me to say, just don't kick me out, right? So, that's another. Absolutely right. But there are ways to break this. One of the ways is just give people a partner. It's kind of interesting that if there's another person dissenting against the majority, even if they don't agree with me necessarily, they just model the possibility of people breaking with the majority. So, that is a really powerful way. So, sometimes you get a knock on the door from various groups. They're always in pairs and there's a reason for that. It's a lot easier to do these things with your partner, right? Exactly. So, having a partner really helps. So, there are other ways to get around this too, which is allow the dissenter to speak first like don't make the majority view known. Then, once people have expressed their point of view, even if they later find out that they're at odds with everybody else, chances are they're going to stick to their guns because oddly enough, people would rather be misfits than flipfloppers. You would rather be. You've publicly committed. Exactly. Once you've committed, you stick to it even if you find yourself at odds with the rest of the group. That fits with the idea of letting maybe lower status people speak first. So, they don't just have to conform to. Exactly. Your people in the group. Right. Often, the powerful people want to speak first and they are really bad at remembering that they should keep quiet at first, but those are ways to reduce conformity pressure. All right. So, one of the problems that arise in teams is that they create the potential for a majority to impose their point of view on a minority. Because they have so much power, the minority can readily adopt their point of view. This may come as a surprise to you, but when a minority just mindlessly adopts the point of view of everyone else, that tends not to be something that encourages creativity. Exactly what he said.
