If you’re out to create something truly great, you’ll likely need to challenge some widely held — but incorrect — beliefs. Challenging conventional wisdom is much harder than most people realize, and those that do make us uncomfortable. Which is why it’s so important to learn how to identify and embrace people who see the world differently than you do.

Evolutionary Biology and Conformity

Imagine our ancient ancestors out on the savanna in search of food. Chasing a large group of hunters who were running after something out of view was probably a better survival strategy than pursuing animal tracks that may or may not have led to food. Gregory Berns argues that mankind’s propensity to follow the crowd is at least partially a result of evolutionary biology.

Such a propensity is so ingrained in human nature that we will go to ridiculous lengths in order to adjust our beliefs to those of a group, as proven in the series of conformity experiments run by Solomon Asch in the 1950s. According to Wikipedia:

In the basic Asch paradigm, the participants — the real subject