fabulous confabulation

I've written this before - and will likely write it many times again - but by far the strongest factor in determining what you believe is the beliefs of the people around you. You are who you hang out with.

"Social proof," as social psychologists call the phenomenon, happens for many reasons. It's easier to do what your friends do because it saves you the time and mental energy of trying to figure out on your own what's "right" to do. It also keeps you from getting flack from those friends if you happen to disagree with them. But regardless of why we are so impressionable, about 90%-99% of our beliefs, preferences and values come by virtue of who are families are, where we went to school, the city we live in etc. (and that's being generous).

That may seem like obvious to some. But for most of us the idea that 99% of our beliefs and preferences aren't the product of independent thought may rankle. It feels like I'm doing my own thinking, but you're telling me I'm merely parroting my peers? Yup.

The reason it rankles is because our brain doesn't tell us we're just following the crowd; it makes us believe we've arrived at our own conclusions as the result of reasoned thought. That is, we confabulate.

A 2003 study from Geoffrey Cohen shows a stark example of social proof and confabulation at work. He gave a group of liberal and conservative participants two proposals for a welfare policy, one that gave generous welfare benefits and one with strict benefits. As expected, liberal participants liked the generous policy while the conservative subjects tended to prefer the stringent version. But then Cohen switched things up; he presented the generous policy as a Republican-supported initiative and the strict one as a Democrat plan, with arguments from either side tossed in. When this happened, as social proof would predict, liberals were more likely to back the strict benefits plan with conservatives preferring the generous plan.

Even though the participants were obviously swayed by which party supported the plans, that's not what they said happened. Instead subjects all reported that their preference was based upon the details of the proposal, their personal beliefs about government and their experiences with welfare.

Were they lying? Did they know their views were swayed by social proof, but were ashamed to admit it? Anything's possible, but more likely confabulation happened under the radar. Without missing a beat, their brains made up a rationale that suits their views of themselves as rational, independently thinking beings. Little did they - or any of us - know that we should never trusts what our brains tell us.