Conformity.

We thrive on our ability to work together as a community and depend on one another, using our individual strengths to fill in for someone's weaknesses and vice versa.

However, what we don't often realize is our ability to conform is extraordinary.

How extraordinary?

Well, a popular study by Stanley Milgram revealed that conformity can take place in life or death situations.

Participants were ordered to shock another participant with varying degrees of voltage, one of them being fatal.

Of course, the person being shocked was only pretending, though the one delivering the charge didn't know that.

When ordered by an authority figure to shock the participant, 60% of them would follow their commands to the point that they would deliver the fatal shock.

Another famous experiment called the Ash Conformity Experiment found that in a classroom setting, when presented with a question, students tended to agree with their peers even if the answer contradicts their experience.

They did this by presenting lines on a board and asking each student which one was longer.

There was one participant along with actors that would give clearly wrong answers.

Going around the room, each actor student gave their wrong answer.

When it came to the actual participant, more often than not, they would give the same answer as their incorrect peers.

Have you been guilty of going with the crowd?

Confirmation bias.

We like to think that we are correct.

It feels good when you're trying to argue a point with someone and pull up a piece of information that proves you right.

However, you may not actually be seeing the whole picture here.

Confirmation bias, according to Simply Psychology, is the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their existing beliefs or hypotheses.

This means that people tend to look for information to prove themselves right versus finding evidence that they're wrong.

You may find that when having a political discussion with someone, they get their information from people that agree with them versus reading about people that disagree with their point of view.

We've all been there.

Shorter is better.

Ever wonder why things like newspapers use narrower columns?

You might think it's because it will help you read faster.

Research published by MC Dyson in 2004 on typography would show that many people agree with you.

However, that's incorrect.

The same research suggests that actually this slows your reading pace down.

Yet most people agree that they would prefer to read narrower columns.

Why is this?

An article from ClickFocus, a company that specializes in web development and design, explains that this is likely because smaller columns make your content look more bite-sized, therefore making it easier to navigate.

So if you're a web designer yourself, what's the magic number?

ClickFocus suggests between 40 to 100 characters per line, keeping in mind that the more characters you add, the faster the readability will be.

Coffee cups?

We have an experiment for you to try.

Pause the video and draw your interpretation of a coffee cup.

Now that you're done, does it look something like this?

This is called the canonical perspective and was the focus for researchers Palmer, Roche, and Chase.

They found that when asking people to draw a coffee cup or any small object, the participants drew the object as if you were viewing them on a countertop.

An article from medium.com interprets this particular angle as giving you the most visual information.

You're able to see the most out of the depth, form, and shape of the object from this slightly elevated angle.

They also found this with other objects as well.

It turns out we wanna give the most information possible to our audience and we'll reflect that in our work.

Classic conditioning.

If you've ever trained a pet, you likely engaged in classical conditioning.

This concept deals with using small stimuli to encourage or discourage a behavior.

For example, if you're training a dog to shake a paw, you'll likely give them a treat every time they do it correctly.

Pretty soon, every time you get near the treats, you'll find them eager to shake your hand.

Technically, shaking your hand won't magically produce a treat, but because you give them one for doing it, they know that if they wanna be rewarded, they will shake your hand.

Humans are not too far off from dogs in this regard as we use classical conditioning in all sorts of scenarios, but sometimes it happens unexpectedly.

A very well-mined article gives us an example.

They explained that hypothetically, if you didn't pay close attention to dogs, but then all of a sudden were bit by one and then were afraid of them afterward, that would be a conditioned response.

You would have a fear response every time you saw a dog because you associate them with that memory.

We are a product of our environment.

This may be an odd question, but what's the first thing that comes to mind when you think of being in prison?

You probably think of an intimidating environment where you're being completely controlled by authoritative figures.

But why is this?

Do prison workers simply have a certain personality to do what they do?

After all, many of us would feel uncomfortable having that kind of control over people.

This is what the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment hoped to shed light on.

They collected a group of participants, surveying them to limit those who may be more prone to aggression so they wouldn't get people prone to violence to participate and assigned people into groups of prisoners and guards.

The guards were then told to do what it takes to maintain order in their imaginary prison.

Ultimately, this simulation had many parallels with reality.

What they found was that many of the guards took full advantage of their authority and would routinely harass and abuse their prisoners into submission.

The experiment is controversial, but the findings suggest that the events that took place were situational and not innate, meaning people act in accordance with their environment and to keep order.

If you were put in this situation, you may find your actions may be different from what you believe.

While we like to think that we're built differently, there are many ways that we're stuck with the same nature as everyone else.

Perhaps you can think of different ways that these points show up in your life.

Let us know about them in the comments.

Thank you for tuning in.

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