Internalized Norms

Almost everyone knows about the Stanley Milgram Obedience/Shock Experiment. It showed pretty convincingly that a high percentage of participants would obey an authority figure even if it meant hurting another individual. On the cusp of a new age (Heart) and with our current climate of turmoil and chaos, we see that hurting another at the behest of a “superior” is happening; cruelty is the point.

Society has rules, or norms, we usually follow without thinking. On the New York City subway, people know that if they find a seat, they can sit down; if not, they have to stand.

That’s a big picture view. But if you look at a small picture, the individual rather than society, people conform to their own “tribe.” They internalize the beliefs and attitudes of their group with their own feedback loop and their own self-serving bias. In some instances, the internalized norms are so ingrained that there simply is no straw that will break the camel’s back, no one leaves the cult. 

Here is where Milgram comes back into the picture. Milgram’s hypothesis was that internalized norms are accepted as common knowledge, are pretty much immoveable, and are permanent. In his subway experiment, his Yale graduate students went onto the New York City subways and asked people to give up their seats. This challenged the internalized norm: first come first served. To his surprise, in over half the instances in which a student asked someone to give up their seat, the seated passenger did. Internalized norms can be temporary and can change, there just needs to be a reason..  

The skill required to succeed in the Age of the Heart is to gently question internalized norms. Give yourself (or another) a reason to think or behave differently. Ask why we cling to our tribe or unquestionably accept societal norms. Rather than clinging to our subway seat, we can check our self-serving bias, see a different perspective, or acknowledge the curse of knowledge. In these tumultuous times it makes a lot of sense to check our own internalized norms.