People are conformists by nature | Vasily Klucharev | TEDxSadovoeRing

Vasily Klucharev, a neuroscientist, explores the biological roots of human conformism through his laboratory research. He traces his interest in social influence to Vladimir Bekhterev's early work on suggestion and collective behavior, and to classic social psychology experiments like Solomon Asch's line-matching study, which demonstrated that people often suppress their correct opinions to match incorrect group consensus.

Klucharev's breakthrough came when he discovered neuroeconomics—a field bridging economics and neuroscience—which allowed him to formalize hypotheses about the brain mechanisms underlying conformism. He theorized that the brain has evolved to treat disagreement with the group as an error signal, triggering automatic opinion changes for survival reasons. To test this, his team conducted fMRI experiments where subjects rated facial attractiveness while being shown differing group opinions. The results revealed that the cingulate cortex—a brain region associated with error detection—activates when subjects' opinions diverge from group consensus, approximately 240 milliseconds after the discrepancy is perceived.

Further experiments using transcranial magnetic stimulation showed that suppressing cingulate cortex activity reduced conformist behavior by half, confirming the causal role of this error-detection mechanism. Klucharev discusses two evolutionary explanations: the "wisdom of crowds" theory suggests groups make better decisions, and evolutionary theory proposes that natural selection has favored those who follow group behavior, as alternatives have historically been punished. However, he cautions that in modern, rapidly changing environments, excessive conformism may inhibit progress and creative thinking. The talk concludes by reflecting on the tension between our neurobiological conformist tendencies and the individual courage required to oppose state authority or majority opinion.