Western Standard - August 21, 2025


Performative virtue signaling rewires your brain

Mentioned
Johnny Walker Forrest Ramey Jonathan Haidt Roman Walkman
Canada’s Bloated Bureaucracy： +99,000 Staff, 77% Higher Costs & Worse Services American advice for Canada's PM - 'Get rid of DEI!'

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

150.43

Word count

1,006

Sentence count

46

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Dr. Jonathan Haid, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto, joins Dr. Kelly to talk about the growing problem of conformity on campus, and the neurobiological evidence behind it. Dr. Haid and his co-author, Kevin W. Walkman, discuss the neurobiology of conformity and how it impacts the development of the brain.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Say you're a student in university with a professor with some views that, well, just don't
00:00:04.700 align with yours. Did you ever consider pretending to hold the same views just to get by? Say to ace
00:00:10.640 a test or a paper? Psychology researchers Forrest Rome and Kevin Walkman asked over 1,452 students
00:00:18.860 whether they have ever done the same. Their study centered around the question, what happens to
00:00:24.180 identity formation when belief is replaced by the adherence to orthodoxy? So we do believe that
00:00:31.700 the long-term consequences of the conformity are real and that they go deeper than just like a
00:00:37.040 fitting in situation. So when young adults consistently silence or reshape parts of
00:00:43.080 themselves to meet the external expectations that we're talking about on the university campus,
00:00:47.200 it does reshape a sense of identity at a developmental stage where authenticity and autonomy are supposed
00:00:53.620 to be consolidating. And it matters because if students conform to avoid conflict or to gain
00:01:00.180 approval, they end up with what we call identity foreclosure. And so that's adopting identities
00:01:09.360 that are handed to them rather than ones that they're genuinely testing themselves. So this can
00:01:14.760 create fragility in adulthood and where one's identity feels conditional upon approval rather
00:01:21.560 than being rooted in actual internal conviction. And so repeatedly suppressing authentic expression
00:01:29.260 does reinforce certain neural pathways that we're starting to learn more about. So Forrest and I are more
00:01:34.320 into the psychological side of things, but we've been reaching out and learning more about the
00:01:39.140 neurobiological issues. And so these stress responses are actually something that we need to
00:01:43.760 factor in as well. So conformity doesn't just change behavior. It actually rewires the brain to
00:01:48.280 prioritize external validation over self-regulation. And that's something that does have long-term mental
00:01:54.780 health risks. So sustained conformity and it can lead to anxiety, depression and burnout.
00:02:01.980 Roman Walkman also note that conformity bleeds into relationships and can even contribute to the
00:02:08.360 feeling of loneliness. So people who live with, you know, this false sense of performative self often
00:02:16.180 report a sense of emptiness or loss of meaning or even resentment later in life. So it's not just
00:02:23.460 what we're experiencing with the kids on campus. It's we're predicting that this actually is going to be
00:02:29.120 tougher than later on the road. Wow. Yeah. I would just add that we're interested in this on a personal
00:02:38.200 individual level, how it impacts the psychological development of individual people, but also the
00:02:44.180 ramifications of that developmental impingement on a larger social scale. So for individuals,
00:02:50.680 I see it as having two main impacts. One is it makes it, it interferes with people's process of
00:02:59.320 developing an internal moral framework, like being able to determine for themselves what's right and
00:03:04.020 what's wrong. And that's difficult. Like that's a problem on different levels, but it also messes with
00:03:10.780 people's ability to think critically. If they're just used to either internalizing and regurgitating
00:03:16.460 certain progressive, I would say even radical talking points, they're not really sifting through
00:03:21.720 information themselves and developing the ability to discern between truth and untruth. And on a
00:03:28.440 personal level, it's an issue for the reasons Kevin just described, but on a larger social level,
00:03:33.720 it's an issue particularly because it, without an internal framework guiding you and without the sense of
00:03:39.980 agency and autonomy that comes from thinking for yourself, people are very susceptible to ideologies
00:03:48.940 that are designed to fragment society, to erode social cohesion, to radicalize people in different
00:03:57.260 ways towards the left and the right of the political spectrum. So it actually has implications,
00:04:03.100 not to sound hyperbolic, but that's the stuff of civilizational decline.
00:04:07.340 You know, we've also, one of the really, um, alarming keys that we're starting to, um, uh,
00:04:13.820 realize here is that, um, on a relational level, this conformity fosters really shallow connections.
00:04:20.540 Um, so friendships and professional relationships built on this sort of appeasement rather than honesty,
00:04:26.700 they really do lack true intimacy. And this is creating, um, uh, just, uh, um, more of the,
00:04:33.100 more of a tendency to have like these, the depression and anxiety and a lack of trust in other people.
00:04:39.340 We're learning that a lot of these students don't even trust their best friends because they're so
00:04:43.660 used to this performative virtue signaling that it really, because the consequences go beyond now,
00:04:49.100 um, uh, the classroom, it's now in society on the campus itself.
00:04:53.420 I'm not sure who coined the term. I think of it as originating with Jonathan Haidt, the social
00:04:58.460 psychologist, the crisis of meaning. But I think that's a pretty accurate description of what's
00:05:04.620 going on. And of course we're, of course we're in a crisis of meaning if people aren't actually
00:05:10.060 learning to figure out what's meaningful for themselves. But if there are criticisms, one of
00:05:15.420 them is that, well, human beings have always conformed and always been likely to try to, you know,
00:05:20.540 fit into a group and it's true. There are evolutionary biological reasons for conformity
00:05:25.820 and young people have always been especially susceptible to it. I think, yes, it's definitely 1.00
00:05:31.580 on a new scale. And I think one of the reasons is that there's almost zero viewpoint diversity on
00:05:38.700 campuses, at least in the U S so people would conform into their groups originally, but those
00:05:44.860 groups could be young Republicans, young Democrats. There was a variety of interests
00:05:50.380 represented that people could conform to, so to speak. And now, I mean, colleges have always leaned
00:05:56.780 left at least here for the most part, but you would be really hard pressed to find a conservative or even
00:06:04.860 a centrist perspective on our elite, the campuses of our elite institutions. And so there's no debate,
00:06:13.260 there's no pushback and there's no dialogue. Really, the discourse is dominated by, in my opinion,
00:06:19.980 very radical progressive ideologies. So it's new in that sense. Like, yes, conformity has always
00:06:25.420 existed and it always will exist, but it hasn't been mandated to this degree in our society before.