Conformity: The Power of Social Influences by Cass Sunstein. He is currently a professor at Harvard and was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for 27 years. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School.
From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board.
In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway. Furthermore in 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioral Insights and Sciences for Health.
In fact, his previous books Nudge and Noise are all best sellers and provide wonderful insights to human behavior. The focus of this book is addressing decisions influenced by social pressure.
Similarly, this can be for the better (logic, facts, and even experiments) or worse. So, it is very easy today to witness irrational social media posts influencing decisions.
Conformity has two faces
Cass begins by sharing a baseline that conformity is be positive or negative. As we know, conformity is a basic requirement and is proving to be necessary today. However, the focus is to understand the larger circumstances and become aware of the effects of conformity upon your decision making process. In addition, there is a real drive to understand the full impact of social media placing new pressures upon individuals to make decisions:
On social media, that happens all the time. The result can be to lead people to errors and even to illness and death. “Fake news” can spread like wildfire; informational cascades are the culprits. In 2017 and 2018, that was a particular concern for Facebook, whose platform has often been used as a basis for the rapid transmission of falsehoods.
pgs. 104-105.
