Are We All Just Copycats?

We like to think we have our own thoughts and feelings. But do we?

Have you ever wondered why men wore wigs in the 1700s? Why tattoos are so popular? Or why everybody bought fidget spinners?

We like to think we have our own thoughts and feelings. Dragon tattoos are cool. I want one. Big white powdered wigs are cool. I want one. We think those thoughts and feelings are uniquely ours. But not so fast.

A long history of evidence says otherwise. And new discoveries in neuroscience are confirming that.

In 1932, Arthur Jenness conducted one of the first social conformity experiments. He put 811 beans in a jar. Participants wrote down in private how many beans they thought were in the jar. Then the participants were split into groups, and nearly everyone changed their answer. But it wasn’t a controlled experiment.

So a few years later, Muzafer Sherif, a Turkish American, did an autokinetic effect experiment. He put individuals in a dark room. They stared at a dot of light that appeared to move but didn’t. Then they gave an estimate of how far the dot moved. But when put in groups of three, most people changed their answers to fit the group. Furthermore, when tested later, they gave the answer of the group rather than their individual answer.

Again in the 1950s, Solomon Asch found that 75% of people changed their answers at least once in a group-setting about the length of a line. More recently, Paul Kassin, famous for his work on false confessions, did the computer crash experiment, where hitting the ALT key would crash the computer. But the computer was rigged to crash anyway. When it did crash, 25% of people confessed to hitting the wrong key when only one actually did. But when an observer said they did, the confession rate went up to a whopping 80%.

An experiment on the TV show Brain Games demonstrated the same thing. A woman in waiting room full of people saw everyone stand up at the sound of a beep. After she gave a few confused looks, she started standing up at the sound of the beep too. She did it even when everyone had left and she was the only one there!

So the question is who is controlling who? Where is the line between who you are and who the group is?

Take the experiment done by Ken and Mary Gergen in 1973. Male and female students were put in a pitch-black padded room for one hour, while a control group was put in a lighted room. In the lighted room, people talked almost non-stop. They stayed in one spot and never physically got close. In the dark room, however, people talked some and moved around a lot. Eventually, they started touching each other. It went so far that people hugged and kissed.

But think about this. If those same students had been in the lighted room, they would not have touched each other. And vice versa. They were doing things they would never do in their normal social life. Who they were was different in the dark than in the light. So which person were they? The one that made out with strangers in the dark, or the one who respected people’s personal space in the light?

So where is the line? Who is in control? The overwhelming consensus is that it’s not necessarily you, but the people around you, your social environment. They are the biggest influence. Their thoughts and feelings become your thoughts and feelings, whether you know it or not. In a dark room, you act differently. The social dynamics are different, and you do things you would never do. That’s because the line between you and your social groups is much more of a mixture.

Neuroscience has shown this mixture. The same region of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, that processes “I think I look good in white powdered wigs ” also processes “My friends think I look good in white powdered wigs.” In other words, what I think about something is mixed in with what you think about something. What actions I take are mixed in with what actions you take. Who know where one begins and the other ends? But we fool ourselves into thinking we are originating these thoughts and actions when we are not.

In the end, it appears we are just copying each other. And all that copying adds up to who we think we really are.