The non-non-conformity bias
How what we believe other people think leads to a peculiar kind of inaction
Picture the scene. A bunch of young adolescents, all dressed up, awkwardly sitting on the chairs surrounding an empty dance floor. The music — a popular song that some are silently singing along to — is loud (not too loud, of course), but nobody moves. The young people keep on eyeing each other until, eventually, a group of girls sitting together gets in a huddle and suddenly, they all jump up in sync, and start dancing. Within seconds, everyone else has joined in, and the school disco has officially started. What took them so long?
You may recognize this scene — perhaps even first hand. It is as if self-consciousness peaks around the age of 13. A teenager’s social status is a precious good that they are loth to jeopardize. Yet somehow, they do not realize that all of their friends feel exactly the same as they do. Once there is safety in numbers — as in the group of girls from the vignette — the process of populating the dance floor is primed, and soon there is no trace of the earlier paralysing hesitancy.
Talking to strangers
This kind of reluctance is not limited to teens, though. Juliana Schroeder, a psychologist at Berkeley University and her colleagues investigated a topic…
