The Element (20 page)

Judith Rich Harris is a developmental psychologist who has looked at the influences on young people of their friends and peer groups. She argues that three main forces shape our development: personal temperament, our parents, and our peers. The influence of peers, she argues, is much stronger than that of parents. “The world that children share with their peers,” she says, “is what shapes their behavior and modifies the characteristics they were born with, and hence determines the sort of people they will be when they grow up.”

Children get their ideas of how to behave by identifying with the group and taking on its attitudes, behaviors, speech, and styles of dress and adornment. “Most of them do this automatically and willingly. They want to be like their peers, but just in case they have any funny ideas, their peers are quick to remind them of the penalties of being different. . . . The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”

Since breaking the rules is a sure way to find ourselves out of the group, we may deny our deepest passions to stay connected with our peers. At school, we disguise an interest in physics because our circle finds it uncool. We spend afternoons playing basketball when what we really want to do is master the five mother sauces. We never mention our fascination with hip-hop because the people we travel with consider something so “street” to be beneath them. Being in your Element may depend on stepping out of the circle.

Shawn Carter was born in the housing projects in Brooklyn, New York. Now known as Jay-Z, he is one of the most successful musicians and businesspeople of his generation, and an icon to millions of people around the world. To become all of that, he first had to confront the disapproval and the skepticism of the friends and peers he grew up with on the Brooklyn streets. “When I left the block, everyone was saying I was crazy,” he has said of his early success. “I was doing well for myself on the streets, and cats around me were like, ‘These rappers are hos. They just record, tour, and get separated from their families, while some white person takes all their money.’ I was determined to do it differently.”

His role model was the music entrepreneur Russell Simmons, and like him, Jay-Z now heads a diverse business empire that’s rooted in his success as a musician but goes beyond it to include a clothing line and a record label. All of this has generated a huge personal fortune for Jay-Z and the renewed respect of many of the friends in Brooklyn he had to move aside to make his way.

In extreme cases, peer groups can become trapped in what psychologist Irving Janis has called “groupthink,” a mode of thinking “that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.” The prevailing belief here is that the group knows best, that a decision or a direction that seems to represent the majority of the group stands beyond careful examination—even when your instincts suggest otherwise.

There are several famous—and sometime infamous—studies of the effects of groupthink, including the Solomon Asch conformity experiments. In 1951, psychologist Asch brought together college students in groups of eight to ten, telling them he was studying visual perception. All but one of the students were “plants.” They knew the nature of the experiment, and Asch had instructed them to give incorrect answers the majority of the time. The real subject—the only one who Asch had not prepared ahead of time—answered each question only after hearing most of the other answers in the group.

Asch showed the students a card with a line on it. He then held up another card with three lines of different lengths and asked them to say which one was the same length as the line on the other card. One was an obvious match but the planted students had been instructed by Asch to say that the match was one of the other lines. When it was time for the subject to answer, the effects of groupthink kicked in. In a majority of cases, the subject answered with the group, and against clear visual evidence, at least once during the session.

When interviewed later, most of the subjects said they knew they were giving the wrong answers but did so because they didn’t want to be singled out. “The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong,” Asch wrote, “that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct.”

Management writer Jerry B. Harvey gives another famous example, known as the Abilene Paradox: On a hot afternoon in Coleman, Texas, the story goes, a family is comfortably playing dominoes on a porch, until the father-in-law suggests they take a trip to Abilene, fifty-three miles north, for dinner. As Harvey describes it, “The wife says, ‘Sounds like a great idea.’ The husband, despite having reservations because the drive is long and hot, thinks that his preferences must be out of step with the group and says, ‘Sounds good to me. I just hope your mother wants to go.’ The mother-in-law then says, ‘Of course I want to go. I haven’t been to Abilene in a long time.’ The drive
is
hot, dusty, and long. When they arrive at the cafeteria, the food is as bad. They arrive back home four hours later, exhausted. One of them dishonestly says, ‘It was a great trip, wasn’t it.’

“The mother-in-law says that, actually, she would rather have stayed home, but went along since the other three were so enthusiastic. The husband says, ‘I didn’t want to go. I only went to satisfy the rest of you.’ The wife says, ‘I just went along to keep you happy. I would have to be crazy to want to go out in the heat like that.’ The father-in-law says that he only suggested it because he thought the others might be bored.

“The group sits back, perplexed that they together decided to take a trip which none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to sit comfortably, but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy the afternoon.”

This is a benign but dramatic illustration of the consequences of groupthink. Every member of the group agreed to do something they didn’t want to do because they thought the others were committed to doing it. The result was that no one came away happy.

Allowing groupthink to inform our decisions about our futures can lead to equally unpleasant—and much more consequential—results. Accepting the group opinion that physics is not cool, playing basketball is better than learning to be a chef, and hip-hop is beneath you is counterproductive not only to the individual but to the group. Perhaps, like those in the Abilene Paradox, others in the circle secretly disagree too but are afraid to stand alone against the group. Groupthink can diminish the group as a whole.

The major obstacles to finding the Element often emerge in school. This is partly because of the hierarchy of subjects, which means that many students never discover their true interests and talents. But within the general culture of education, different social groups form distinctive subcultures. For some groups the code is that it’s just not cool to study. If you’re doing science, you’re a geek; if you’re doing art or dance, you’re effete. For other groups, doing these things is absolutely essential.

The power of groups is that they validate the common interests of their members. The danger of groupthink is that it dulls their individual judgment. The group thinks in unison and behaves en masse. In this respect, schools of people are like schools of fish.

You’ve probably seen images of huge schools of fish swimming in tight formation that instantly move in a new direction like a single organism. Perhaps you’ve seen swarms of insects crossing the sky that spontaneously swoop and swirl like an orchestrated cloud. It’s an impressive display that seems like controlled and intelligent behavior. But the individual herrings or mosquitoes are not acting on free will, as we think of it in humans. We don’t know what may be on their minds as they go along with the crowd, but we do know that when they do it, they act almost as a single creature. Researchers are now understanding more about how this happens.

The probability is that fish make those dramatic tight shifts in direction by following the movements of the fish that lie directly in their field of perception. What appears to be a masterwork of choreography is probably little more than an especially elegant version of follow-the-leader. To illustrate the point, there are now computer programs that simulate the effects of swarms and schools with remarkable accuracy.

A similar principle seems to drive the operations of one of the oldest and most successful creatures on earth, the ant. If you’ve seen an ant wandering aimlessly across your kitchen floor in search of a morsel to eat, you don’t get a sense of a highly developed intelligence at work. Yet the work of ant colonies is a miracle of efficiency and success. Ants depend on what’s known as swarm intelligence, the nature of which is currently the subject of intense study. While they have yet to understand fully how ants have developed such sophisticated teamwork, researchers do know that ants achieve their goals by fulfilling their own very specific roles with military precision.

For instance, when looking for food, one ant starts on a path, leaving a trail of pheromones. The next ant follows this trail, leaving a trail of its own. In this way, a large collection finds its way to the food source and carries it back as a team to the colony. Each ant works toward a global goal, while no one ant takes the lead. In fact, there seems to be no hierarchy at all within ant colonies. Even the queen’s one function seems to be to lay eggs. These patterns of coordinated group behavior in fish, ants, mosquitoes, and most other creatures are principally to do with protection and security, with mating and survival, and with getting food and not becoming food themselves.

It’s much the same with human beings. We aggregate as groups for the same essential and primal purposes. The upside for us is that groups can be tremendously supportive. The downside is that they encourage uniformity of thought and behavior. The Element is about discovering yourself, and you can’t do this if you’re trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can’t be yourself in a swarm.

Beyond the specific social constraints we may feel from families and friends, there are others that are implicit in the general culture. I define culture as the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social groups. Culture is a system of permissions. It’s about the attitudes and behaviors that are acceptable and unacceptable in different communities, those that are approved of and those that are not. If you don’t understand the cultural codes, you can look just awful.

I’ll always remember a man I saw who got it miserably wrong on a beach in Malibu in California. He strutted slowly into our midst, a vision of the unexpected that caused a beach full of strangers to form a deep bond of helpless camaraderie. He was about forty. My guess was that he was some sort of executive, and I could imagine that in certain settings he cut a distinguished figure. But here, he did not. In a land of physical culture and tread-mills, he was pale, hairy, and inhabited a sagging body that clearly spent its days at a desk and its nights on a barstool. One can forgive a man for all of these things. But not for wearing a nylon, leopard-print thong.

The thong clung to his groin like an oxygen mask. A stretch of elastic held it in place, skirting his waist and threading tightly between his bare buttocks. He paraded down the length of the beach, apparently delighted that every eye was turning to him in a slow Mexican wave of amazement. He gave the impression of a self-appointed role model of physical attraction and sexual magnetism bathing in the bright sunlight of popular acclaim. This wasn’t the majority opinion, however. “At least he might have waxed,” said the man next to me.

Why was this so hypnotically amusing for us all? It wasn’t just that he had such an outrageously high opinion of his attractiveness. It was also that he was so far out of context. The outfit and attitude might have worked in the south of France, but in Malibu, for various reasons, it was all wrong. There’s an unspoken code for men on California beaches. It’s a curious mixture of peacock display and public modesty. Oiled torsos and rippling muscles are fine, but naked buttocks are not. All over America, there’s this intricate mixture of prurience and prudishness.

Shortly afterward, my wife, Terry, and I were in Barcelona. There are beaches there that line the harbor in the city center, and every lunchtime during the summer the local offices spill out and young men and women head to the city beaches and sunbathe topless, in thongs at the very most. In Spain, that’s completely accepted. It would be odd there to see someone in a pair of knee-length shorts and a T-shirt. The culture simply accepts that people can wander around virtually naked on the beach.

All social cultures promote what I’d describe as “contagious behavior.” One of the best examples is language, and more particularly accents and dialects. These are wonderful illustrations of the impulse to copy and conform. It would be odd for someone born and raised in the Highlands of Scotland or the Badlands of Montana not to speak the local dialect of English with the local accent. We’d be amazed, of course, if a child born there spontaneously started speaking French or Hebrew. But we’d be just as taken aback if the child spoke the local language in an entirely different dialect or accent from everyone else. The natural instinct of children is to copy and imitate, and as they grow they absorb not only the sounds they hear but the sensibilities they express and the culture they convey. Languages are the bearers of the cultural genes. As we learn a language, accents, and ways of speaking, we also learn ways of thinking, feeling, and relating.

The cultures in which we are raised do not only affect our values and outlook. They also shape our bodies and may even restructure our brains. Language, again, is a prime example. As we learn to speak, our mouths and vocal organs adapt to make the sounds our languages use. If you grow up speaking only one or two languages, it can be physically difficult to create the sounds that other languages require and that other cultures take for granted—those guttural French sounds, or the lispy sounds of Spanish, or the tonal sounds of some Asian languages. To speak a new language, we may have to retrain our bodies to make and understand the new sounds. But the effects of culture may go deeper still—into the actual structures of the brain.