Wisdom of Crowds, Conformity, Nonconformity, Dopamine and Socionics

There is such a concept — «wisdom of crowds». It means that the averaged opinion of a large audience often proves more accurate and more correct than the opinion of the best experts. This term first appeared when the English psychologist Francis Galton decided to conduct a small experiment: he went to a farmers’ festival and asked those gathered to estimate the weight of a bull by eye. And the collective judgment of the crowd of farmers proved more accurate than the estimate made by experts. The aggregate opinion of a large number of people proves correct if the sample of people is random and they have no shared systematic biases.

However, the rule that “the majority is right” works only under stable environmental conditions. Under these conditions, conformity, which adjusts individual assessments to the average general opinion, is beneficial to the individual.

When the environment is unstable (and in the modern political, scientific, or technological world it is always unstable, because everything changes very rapidly and new, previously unknown challenges constantly arise) - then nonconformity becomes useful, because the average opinion of the crowd is incapable of breaking free of the past on its own; it is inert and often mistaken, clinging to standards that have already outlived themselves. For this “general opinion” itself to gradually change in a correct and unbiased direction, it necessarily needs bold leaders, troublemakers, and chieftains who do not depend on collective opinion. That is, nonconformists, people who blaze a new trail and instill new values in society.

What distinguishes a conformist from a nonconformist at the biological level? There are two areas in the brain that are strongly dependent on dopamine. There is an error detector consisting of several neuronal populations from different areas of the brain. Such neuronal populations have been found both in subcortical structures (caudate nuclei, globus pallidus, thalamus) and in the cortex (Brodmann areas 1-4, 7, 40). There is also a pleasure center in the striatum, which rewards approach toward a goal with dopaminergic pleasure and punishes with a reduction in dopamine if the goal becomes more distant. But there, in the striatum, a surge of dopamine that produces a feeling of anticipation also begins if the problem has been recognized and the search for its solution begins.

Any novelty, any mismatch with what is expected leads to a rapid surge of dopamine in certain areas of the brain.

When a conformist sees that his opinion does not coincide with the “correct” one (that is, the opinion of the majority), dopaminergic neurons in the error-detector areas begin to work actively. The error detector becomes sharply activated. By contrast, activity in the “pleasure area” subsides. But if the correct solution still has not been found, activity of dopaminergic neurons responding to the state of uncertainty begins to increase there as well. This surge of dopamine is what sustains the “exploratory drive.”

The general rule, apparently (a hypothesis!), is that an initially high level of dopaminergic activity in the brain enhances the functioning of the “error detector” areas and inhibits the desire for novelty and for a state of uncertainty (which provoke an additional dopamine release). In the case of reduced dopaminergic activity in the brain, however, the situation is more often precisely the reverse.

It also turns out that by temporarily suppressing activity in the “error detector” areas using an external focused electromagnetic influence of a certain rhythmicity, it is possible to reduce people’s need to align their opinion with the opinion of the majority by 40%. Thus, reducing the activity of the error detector makes people more nonconformist.

The same effect also tends to be observed with dopamine deficiency in the brain. But if, on the contrary, dopamine is increased in the error-detection areas, thereby increasing their excitability, conformity increases.

For example, a frontal deficit of dopaminergic activity is usually observed in ADHD. It is no coincidence that people with ADHD pay little attention to the opinions of those around them. However, they also fail to notice or acknowledge most of their own errors.

Antidepressants that raise dopamine, however, may, it seems, increase a person’s conformity, that is, the tendency to “adjust oneself” to general opinion. At least, this is what a number of neurophysiologists currently believe, although research in this area is only now truly beginning to unfold.

An active “Error Detector,” initially well supplied with dopamine (and therefore having no need for additional stimulation of dopamine surges provided by the “exploratory drive”), is sometimes useful and sometimes harmful. It is useful because it is precisely this detector that is responsible for the feeling of discomfort when one has left an iron switched on at home or a door unlocked.

However, the «error detector» also participates in maintaining stable pathological states, for example, some mental illnesses. The “error detector” perceives all attempts to bring the organism out of a pathological state as an “error” and neutralizes them, as a result of which therapeutic methods of treatment prove ineffective.

From the standpoint of socionic parallels, one may suppose that the most active error detectors are found in people with low (vulnerable) Ne (not especially curious), with high Di (clear-cut conformist-conservatives), and also, as a general tendency, negativists. The weakest error detector, by contrast, may be found in positivists with high Ne and low Di.

People who, because of dopamine deficiency, constantly strive to increase their dopamine release through sensations of novelty and the drive of exploratory search, which is activated when what is observed mismatches what is expected, should have weak error detectors that are initially poorly supplied with dopamine. They, probably, - are also the main social nonconformists.

Procrastination, with its flight from the main task into compensatory minor activity promising a rapid immediate increase in dopamine - is also a probable symptom of dopamine deficiency.

But these are all merely hypotheses with indirect and fragmentary supporting evidence. Whether this is so needs to be tested in direct experiments - for example, using fMRI. But modern neuroscience, unfortunately, has not yet even managed to properly compare the functioning of the error detector directly in conformists and nonconformists, let alone socionic functions.

V.T.