Independent Thinking Is A Myth
Questioning The Assumptions
This article was written with the intent to outline my argument against individual thinking. Individual thinking is the notion that human cognition or thought is unrelated to social influences. When mentioning social influences the infamous “nature vs. nurture” debacle comes up. But I attempt to circumvent this debacle by stating it is in our nature to be social.
Others influence us and we influence them in turn, influence in this case refers to impacting thoughts, feelings, and emotions. What I’ve said is not controversial in the fields of social psychology, sociology, and related fields. However, outside of these fields it most certainly is especially with our current sociopolitical environment.
I believe the core tenant of collectivist thinking comes from tribalism. Tribalism simply refers to the fact human beings rely on and work in groups, these groups are called tribes. Certainly these concepts are supported to an extent in the evolutionary sciences.
Evolutionary Underpinnings
Evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology attempt to give us some answers as to why we do what we do or think how we think. These answers relate to evolutionary pressures. It seems to be the case human beings evolved to be social animals developing complex social networks and systems like civilizations. Many give explanations as to why this is the case given it would have been easier to survive a harsh environment with a group of humans rather than one. Nevertheless, we just do not know exactly why humans are social just that they are.
Perhaps this relates to group selection as evolution would occur between and within groups. This could probably explain altruism, conformity, group cohesion, and more. The groups that got along better probably were better able to proliferate their genes via offspring. Since our ancestors (and probably us to an extent) wanted their offspring to thrive this could lead to competition with other tribes of humans. However, this is just speculative and this idea is up for much debate.
There seems to be plausible evolutionary underpinnings leading us to form tribes, favoring our tribe, and being hostile towards other tribes. We probably will never have a clear answer as we cannot know the social behaviors of past hunter-gather humans. We can only try to theorize and speculate based off of the limited evidence we do have but we do know humans are cognitively wired to be social.
The Cognitive Sciences
It is known we have cognitive processes that are dedicated to helping us through a social environment which is in part why we recognize emotions on others pretty well. We might also have neurons specifically dedicated towards understanding the actions of others, these are often dubbed “mirror neurons”. The cognitive sciences typically refer to this area of research as “social cognition”. Social cognition investigates the way information present in the social environment is represented and used in adaptively guiding behavior.
The preference towards pro social behavior can be seen even as an infant. We often start recognizing emotions, social cues, and how to navigate social interactions pretty early in life. In fact these aspects of navigating social relationships between humans seem not only “baked” into our regular cognitive processes but are essential for learning.
As social psychologist Albert Bandura outlines in his theory social learning theory human beings imitate our behaviors from observing and modeling others. We model our behaviors after others based on certain reinforcements and their outcomes, this is outlined pretty well in the bobo doll experiment.
These facts highlight well humans are not “independent thinkers” but in fact our cognitive processes (including learning) stem in large part from our interaction with others.
Social Identity and Conformity
It is fair to say the human brain is tuned to be social, this is evidence in the cognitive sciences and might be explained by evolution. Nevertheless, the downfalls and upsides of our hyper-social brains must be known.
Social psychology makes it abundantly clear humans form groups but not only form them, we prefer our groups and are often hostile to other groups. The groups we identify with are an important part of identity formation according to social identity theory. Social identity theory posits our affiliation within and between groups is what drives conflict with other groups. In simpler terms, we often create an “us” versus “them” dichotomy which underlies probably most of conflicts.
More recent experimental research supporting this comes from David DeSteno and colleagues. One study put participants into arbitrary social groups of “overestimators” and “underestimators”, regardless of the emotional responses elicited from participants they preferred those in their group and were more likely to disregard those outside of their group. DeSteno and colleagues were able to create a sense of prejudice based on arbitrary group designations.
Social psychologist were also able to show we rate those in our ingroup more favorably than those in outgroups even if the action they committed was less favorable towards us. This means people might excuse unfair actions more for those in their social groups, keep in mind these groups can be arbitrary. Perhaps the fact we are more likely to be prejudicial towards others outside of our group and excuse the unfair actions of those inside our group relates to conformity.
Psychologist Solomon Asch showcased in a series of experiments in the 1950s and 1960s that humans are more likely to conform. Conform in the sense they’re more likely to go along with the group… conformity is essential for tribalism. If an individual does not go along with the group or tribe they could mean death, ostracism, or hostility.
Concluding Remarks
Tribalism simply refers to the fact human beings rely on and work in groups. Working in groups seems to be a fundamental aspect of the human condition as we have formed complex societies containing numerous people.
The groups we affiliate ourselves do affect our emotional state, our thinking, and our behaviors to an extent. Humans seem tuned to be social and learn from our interactions with others.
I am outlining these facts to get rid of the “independent thinker” myth. This myth refers to the idea one person can think totally independent outside of their social interactions. The evidence seems to largely point in favor that human beings are social animals and we have various heuristics which guide us towards favoring our group while disliking others.
The goal is by accepting these facts about humans we can open up conversations on difficult topics. By understanding the fallibility of human cognition we can better listen, be more humble, and understand better the full complexity of the world we created.