It's Friday, and time for a short bonus episode, just to give you a flavour of one of the full

length ones that I make on Patreon. So, if you like what you hear, and you fancy going a bit

deeper, you can head over to my Patreon page if you like and get access to the full version,

along with all the previous ones as well. So this week we're talking about conformity,

about why we do things just because others do them too, even when it feels uncomfortable,

even when it doesn't make any sense to conform and how we can start noticing those patterns

and gently step away from them.

Because we all do it, don't we? We all will at times go along with something that we don't

really believe in. There's always going to be times where we laugh at a joke that we don't

find funny, nod along in a conversation even though we disagree. And most of the

time, we don't actually even realise that we're doing it. That's what makes conformity so sneaky.

It doesn't feel like peer pressure. It actually feels like normal. In the full episode,

I go into a bit of detail about the old Solomon Ash line experiment, if you've never heard of that.

It's the one where people will deliberately give the wrong answer to a simple question, because they just copied what some fake participants said,

even though the real participant could see the right answer. They still went along with

the group anyway, just to avoid standing out, just to fit in. And then there's that brilliant

social prank known as no soap radio. It's a joke with no punchline. It's just nonsense.

And yet when a couple of people laugh at the

punchline, that doesn't make any sense. Others will too. Because not laughing, being the only one

not laughing, feels worse than pretending. And what that shows us is just how far we will go to feel

included, even if it means betraying ourselves a little bit

in the process. Now, sometimes conformity is helpful. Conformity keeps us safe. It gives us social

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