As the daughter and granddaughter of academics, and the only one in my family with the opportunity to become one, becoming an academic felt almost inevitable. No one in my family exerted any pressure, and I was always free to choose my own path. But deep inside, without fully realising it, I felt the pull of a family tradition and what I assumed it expected of me.
The influence of others on our decisions extends well beyond the people closest to us. It reaches into the expectations that society has built around us: what you should do depending on your gender, your background, your status, your family history. And these expectations do not always have to be explicitly expressed. We can absorb them over years until they become part of our own internal narrative about what we should do.
In psychology, the act of adapting one’s attitudes, beliefs, or decisions to match those expectations is called social conformity. The pioneering work of Solomon Asch in the 1950s gave a vivid demonstration of how powerful this pull is. In a simple line-judgement experiment, research participants identified two clearly different lines as identical simply because a group of actors, instructed by Asch, said they were the same. The pressure to conform overrode what participants could plainly see.
The psychological and brain basis of conformity
The need to conform has deep roots. Humans have a natural tendency to align their behaviours and beliefs with those around them, and this tendency is often more subconscious than deliberate. Psychological research shows that conforming is driven by a need for social acceptance and personal coherence. Being approved by others elicits positive emotions, makes us feel confident and maintains a positive self-concept. These positive feelings reinforce further behaviours meant to generate further acceptance and, therefore, further conformity behaviours. This is also known as reward-based (or reinforcement) learning.
The link between conformity and reward is supported by neuroscientific findings. A 2009 study by neuroscientist Klucharev and colleagues showed that aligning with others’ views, or changing one’s views to conform, activates the brain’s reward circuitry. Cognitive neuroscientist Campbell-Meiklejohn extended this in 2012, showing that the tendency to conform is modulated by dopamine, a neurotransmitter central to reward processing. Conforming, in other words, feels good and this is clearly reflected in neurobiological mechanisms.
The reverse is also true. Deviation from group opinions leads to expectations of social exclusion and this is usually associated with negative emotions. When individuals realise their opinions diverge from the group, brain regions associated with negative emotion, including the amygdala, and conflict monitoring, including the cingulate cortex, become active. According to the findings from Klucharev and colleagues, deviations from group norms are processed as prediction error signals, indicating to the brain that behaviour needs to be adjusted to restore social alignment. The pressure to conform thus is not a weakness or a failure of independent thinking. It is a deeply embedded feature of how human brains process social information.
How conformity shapes decisions at crossroads
The problem arises when conformity pressures operate below the level of awareness and override more considered judgment. This is particularly consequential at major crossroads, when the decisions we make are shaped not by what we actually want but by what others expect or by what we have internalised from others over years, sometimes decades. Societal pressures could dissuade people from choosing careers that align with their passions and this can easily lead to career misfits, career stagnation and, in the worst cases, burnout.
In my own case, the pressure to continue a family tradition of academic life shaped a career path that brought genuine opportunities and periods of deep satisfaction, but that sometimes felt like a misfit. I felt different from colleagues who seemed to have a true vocation for producing science, perhaps from an early age. For instance, I lacked their enthusiasm at conferences when presenting their research or hearing others presenting. I would try to match their enthusiasm, but it rarely came naturally, and that gap made me feel inadequate rather than simply different.
When I considered leaving academia, again I was under the influence of many imagined watching eyes. How could I leave when academia was such a large part of my family history? What would my colleagues think? Would they see me as someone who could not cope? What I did not yet understand was how much of that chorus existed only in my own mind. I had confused what I imagined others expected of me with what they actually expected.
During this period, I had a dream I have never forgotten. My grandfather (pictured below), a prominent academic who had died years before, was at a conference, surrounded by colleagues. In the dream, I was watching from a distance, and I kept thinking: only I know he is dead. Nobody else here knows. When I woke up, something had shifted. It was as if, through that dream, my grandfather and my whole family had given me permission to say that my academic path was also dead, and that it was time for others to know too.
When I eventually told my family, I was terrified. I had spent years carrying what I assumed was their judgement. After some initial surprise, they supported me wholeheartedly. Most of my former colleagues responded similarly, more likely to say “I admire your courage” than the widely anticipated “I think you are crazy.” The judgement I had feared so intensely turned out to be almost entirely my own.
What you can do
When I work with clients under conformity pressure, one of the most consistent patterns I notice is the use of many shoulds in their narrative. I should stay. I should not change direction at this stage. I should be grateful for what I have. Those shoulds rarely belong entirely to the person saying them.
An exercise I use for this is simple but often surprisingly revealing. Write down the main reasons you are hesitating to make a move. Read each one aloud. Then for each one ask yourself: “Whose voice is this?” Is it genuinely yours, or does it belong to a parent, a colleague, a professional culture, a standard you absorbed so long ago you have forgotten it was never your own?
Once you identify who that voice belongs to, you can shift your focus back to your own values, motivations, and what genuinely excites you. In other words, your reality when you remove everyone else’s expectations. A powerful question to guide this reflection is “What would I do if nobody was watching?”.
When you recognise and let go of the social expectations, it is easier to hear your authentic voice and separate it from the choir of all the people talking around you, imagined or real. The conformity pressure is not hiding your authentic preference. It is making it harder to hear and trust. And the judgement you are most afraid may be, as it was for me, far less present in reality than it is in your own mind.
Finding yourself stuck in a circle of overthinking?
Let’s discuss how working together could help you. Contact me or arrange a complimentary 60-minute consultation call.
About the author
Dr Giulia Galli. An accredited coach, chartered psychologist, and academic neuroscientist with twenty years of experience in understanding people’s thinking, decisions and behaviour. You can read more about my story and my approach to coaching here.
