Conformity: it’s not just for high school kids
Tonight I finished the book The Lucifer Principle, and a great deal of the book is spent unintentionally debunking the popular myth that humans are radically different from animals. The fact of the matter is that while humans possess the ability to be rational and control their behavior, they often choose not to. Or they may act in a way that they feel is rational, but when looked at objectively is anything but. Anyway, I digress. Throughout the book, parrallels and comparisons are drawn between rats, chimpanzees, gorillas, and other animals. The startling truth is that humans mirror animal behavior more than we’d like to think. So it came as no surprise to me this week when I read that chimpanzees are conformists, just like humans. In fact, I was surprised that research hadn’t already discovered this.
In the case of this study, two dominant female chimpanzees were taught two different methods of getting food out of an apparatus, poking versus lifting. Then these chimps were sent back to their respective clans, where they taught others how to get the food out of the apparatus. But a funny thing happened along the way. Some chimps from the lifting group discovered that poking was more effective than lifting. But instead of continuing to poke, they conformed to the method that the others in their group used.
The conformity bias finding was an unexpected, but equally important, result of this culture study, according to Dr. Horner. A few members of each group independently discovered the alternative method for freeing food from the Pan-pipes, but this knowledge did not endanger the groups’ traditions because most of these chimpanzees reverted back to the norm set by their local expert. “Choosing the group norm over the alternative method shows a level of conformity we usually associate only with our own species,” said Dr. Horner. “By using the group’s technique rather than the alternative method, we see the conformity is based more on a social bond with other group members than the simple reward of freeing the food.”
Perhaps not so strangely, this propensity to conform is due to the power of the meme that ties the particular chimpanzee peer group together. While not as complex as, for example, a religious meme, the mere fact that a chimpanzee could be singled out as deviating from his social norm could endanger his position within the social superorganism by causing him to stick out. Standing out in a social group is an easy way to become a social outcast, and more than anything else, social creatures desire acceptance from their peer groups, even if it might be uncomfortable or unhealthy. (Bulemia is a good example of this from the human world.) Even if this new method allows the chimp to get more food out of the apparatus, he will not endanger his position within the superorganism: he will not risk losing his place in the pecking order. Now if that chimp were at the bottom, he would be more inclined to poke rather than lift, simply because he has no place to go but up in the pecking order. Similarly, if he were to be at the top of the pecking order, he might also be inclined to poke rather than lift, though less so than if he were at the bottom, because he would have something to lose by disrupting the status quo.
I would say humanity is almost a perfect mirror of this: those on the bottom generally want to elevate their station in life through one means or another, and those at the top prefer to stay at the top, and thus become more conservative so as to maintain the status quo. I think we’re not as special and different from the rest of the animal world as we would like to think.
7 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos
We are all monkeys.
hanser has a very nice writeup over at polyscience.org about an article about research showing that chimpanzees are conformists too in their little chimp society even when better methods to do things are discovered. From Rian’s writeup: In the case…
Trackback by seriously. wtf. — August 23, 2005 @ 12:29 pm
You’re right to be surprised “that research hadn’t already discovered this.”, because this is not a new discovery at all; just a typical university press release trying to make the work sound more groundbreaking than it actually is.
I wrote a paper on this a few years ago (and the actual chimp research I surveyed is about 10 years old now), and I pretty much agree with your analysis of the phenomenon. The only thing I’d add is that I think there’s also a strong element of ingroup-outgroup definition going on here. By that I mean that part of the troop’s identity is defined in terms of not doing things like that other troop over there. I think you can probably see how this also relates to human society…
Comment by eldan — August 28, 2005 @ 1:45 pm
[...] from polyscience.org, found at arstechnica In the case of this study, two dominant female chimpanzees were taught two different methods of getting food out of an apparatus, poking versus lifting. Then these chimps were sent back to their respective clans, where they taught others how to get the food out of the apparatus. But a funny thing happened along the way. Some chimps from the lifting group discovered that poking was more effective than lifting. But instead of continuing to poke, they conformed to the method that the others in their group used. [...]
Pingback by giantkicks.com » Conformity: it’s not just for high school kids — September 5, 2005 @ 1:02 am
[...] From personal experience, this “thinking outside the box” behavior can be learned. I think that most people ignore most creative input, opting instead to do the normal thing with the normal tools at hand. Perhaps this is why children are so much more creative than adults most of the time: young children haven’t learned the social value of conformity. And it is this embraced creative input that schizotypal personalities exhibit that cause them to be labelled “abnormal.” [...]
Pingback by polyscience.org » Schizotypal creativity — September 8, 2005 @ 2:45 pm
[...] I have written in the past about the difference between genes and memes, and the human social structure. It is thought that these evolutionary changes conferred to us some greater ability to survive (such is the nature of natural selection). But natural selection doesn’t have to be limited to purely physical pressures. Societal pressures can nudge natural selection along a given path by allowing those with greater societal savvy (for lack of a better term) to procreate more. As humans became more community based and interdependent on one another, the ability to interact socially as a means of reproducing becomes valuable. In essence, genes serve the overarching meme, which is complex interdependence and economics. [...]
Pingback by polyscience.org » The human brain is still evolving — September 15, 2005 @ 6:09 pm
Nice write-up. I was just surfing and came along this site, but I think you wrote a nice essay.
Comment by Matt — May 21, 2006 @ 8:14 pm
I’ve never been able to relate to the idea that humans are drastically different than other animals and I’m glad that there are studies like the one mentioned above to help dissolve this illusion. It seems to make a lot of since, and in my humble opinion it seems to fit evolutionary theory very nicely. I do not find it surprising at all that homo sapiens share behavioral traits with other animals because it would make sense that other animals would share certain adaptive traits that come about from similar evolutionary struggles. Especially to a mammal that’s as close to us on the evolutionary tree as a chimpanzee. These are just a few thoughts of mine to be taken with a grain of salt.
Comment by Will — February 18, 2007 @ 5:15 am