Popular Delusions: How Social Conformity Molds Society and Polit ...

Toward the end of the book, I revisit Mackay’s vision of society and examine how ordinary collective behavior can spiral toward disaster.

Conformity and Nonconscious Cognition

The theory of conformity in this book draws heavily on findings in psychology over the past twenty years about how the brain works. In short, psychologists now tell us that people are not as rational as they think. This is not to say that people cannot think and act rationally, but often they do not. The psychological finding most at odds with conventional beliefs about people being rational thinkers is that much goal setting, attitude formation, and decision making goes on without conscious awareness.⁴ Psychologists use the terms nonconscious, cognitive unconscious, or adaptive unconscious to describe this mental activity; for simplicity and consistency, I use the first term, nonconscious. Instances well documented to involve nonconscious thinking include, for example, tendencies to categorize and stereotype people.⁵ Moreover, people routinely have biases in their thinking that alter their decisions or lead them to make bad decisions, not in line with their goals.⁶ Psychologists do not agree on how much of our thinking and acting originates consciously versus nonconsciously, but the effect of nonconscious cognition is substantial.

Not only do nonconscious mental activities go on without a person’s awareness or intention, nonconscious learning occurs without any effort, much as a child learns to speak. This mental activity is not accessible to the conscious part of the mind, but that does not mean that people are making decisions in a trance, like subjects of hypnosis. This is because the conscious mind monitors the result of nonconscious thought and then constructs rational explanations for it. People can be aware of the results of an unconscious mental process but lack awareness of the process itself.⁷ Later I show that many voters display a lot of conformist behavior in their voting choices. Often their decisions are a reflection of how they expect other people to vote. If they are asked to explain their voting decisions in an opinion poll, however, they invariably offer other reasons.