The Tyranny Of Conformity

  

Tyranny of Conformity

M. Bakri Musa

Excerpt #25 from my book:  Qur’an, Hadith, and Hikayat:  Exercises In Critical Thinking.

October 5, 2025

 

In the 1950s the Yale psychologist Solomon Asch conducted his famous conformity experiments on visual judgement. The “test” was simple enough; the subjects were made to estimate the length of two lines.

 

         Clear and objective, with no values or emotions involved. His subjects were Yale undergraduates, a super select group. The test was done in a group but unbeknown to the subject, the other participants in the group were part of the experimental team.

 

         The results were startling. Nearly a third of the subjects gave wrong answers because of pressure from the others whom they thought were also experimental subjects like themselves, demonstrating the powerful effect of peer pressure.

 

         There were many subsequent variations to that original experiment, as with having other than Yale students as subjects, changing the size of the “consensus” group, pairing the subject with a “trusted” partner and seeing the effect when that ‘partner’ disagreed, and having a single dissenting member within the collaborators group.

 

         This last variation was most intriguing. Having even one dissenting member in the “collaborator” group would reduce substantially one’s propensity to conform, or to use the popular phrase, of “going along to get along.”

 

         This persuasive power of a dissenting minority of even one to disrupt group consensus has great significance. This effect would be amplified if the dissenter were to be assertive or otherwise be seen as influential or a powerful member of the group. This insight could be leveraged to good use. When working on collaborative projects, leaders often assign someone to be the designated dissenter just to prevent this tendency towards erroneous and dangerous “groupthink.”

 

         President Kennedy’s greatest regret was his ordering the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. That botched attempt humiliated America, apart from costing precious lives. He had relied on and later blamed the advice of his ‘inbred’ (professionally) group of insiders. He could blame them but he could not escape the ultimate responsibility of having appointed them and then heeding their disastrous advice.

 

         This peer pressure effect has a more benign if not hilarious Malaysian version. All it would take for a suggestible group of school girls to go into mass hysteria is for one highly imaginative teenager to see a ghost lurking behind her mosquito net. Soon the whole dorm if not school would be seeing ghosts, with the size and grotesqueness increasing with each afflicted teenager recounting her ‘vision.’

 

         The only thing sillier is for their teachers to call in the bomoh instead of exposing that incident through an exercise in critical thinking.

 

         For Muslims, there is the added problem of our sheer reverence for anything related to our faith. This reverence for the Qur’an is not misplaced. However, far too often we trivialize this Holy Book by treating it as an amulet. Critical thinking is never more needed then when reading holy texts or interpreting hadith. The Qur’an contains Allah’s revelations but what gives meaning to those words are the subsequent interpretations. Those are the works of mortals, and as such suffer from all the imperfections inherent in such endeavors. Hence the need for critical thinking in evaluating those ancient treatises. Hadith are not even the words of Allah but those attributed to Prophet Muhammad. The key and operative word here is “attributed.”

 

         Indeed, the salient features of early Islam were the vigorous differences in interpretations of those revelations by our ancient luminaries. Even such basic issues as whether the Qur’an was created or eternal were challenged. Those vigorous disputes led to the subsequent efflorescence of the faith and away from blind acceptance of dogmas. The Mutazilites, or rationalists, exemplified this. It is this unique attribute of ancient Muslims to think critically that we must revive.   

 

         Yes, there was a price to pay for those vigorous differences, and a very severe one. The ummah today is still paying for that. That is, the vigorous thinking resulted in the ummah being divided into various sects. As painful and traumatic as that was (it still remains so to this day) that is still preferable to one mass robotic sheep-like mass of unthinking followers. 

 

Next Excerpt #26:  Qur’an And Hadith