CONFORMITY the un-clear but ever-present DANGER

On the anniversary of Rome’s injunction to Galileo, we turn our heretical telescope on the forces of conformity moulding both how we see the world, and how AI presents it to us…

Last night at the Wyndham’s Theatre the brilliant Papa Essiedu, in the character of Chris Keller, delivered one of the best-known lines from Arthur Miller’s All My Sons:

“I like to keep abreast of my ignorance.”

All My Sons is basically a play about the corrosive nature of secrets and lies, and Miller could well have added a coda from Galileo himself, the towering Pisan astronomer who was placed under 8+ years' house arrest by Pope Urban VIII for claiming that the planets moved around the Sun:

‘It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.’

Of course heresy has provided a rich vein of material for The Business of Pleasure over the millenia; from Euripides to 1984 and Robert Bolt/Fred Zinnemann's A Man For All Seasons. Not to mention the afore-mentioned Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. But as Bertolt Brecht has Galileo say in the play of the same name: “The truth is born of the times, not authority.”

Needless to say, it is not only Papal Inquisitions that seek to mould that truth. And while Big Brother might well be ‘watching us,’ it’s the stuff we don’t watch out for, or that slips in below our line of sight, that really makes us malleable, as the introduction to Asch’s seminal 1955 work 'Opinions and Social Pressure, suggests:

 “How, and to what extent, do social forces constrain people’s opinions and attitudes? This question is especially pertinent in our day.  The same epoch that has witnessed the unprecedented technical extension of communication has also brought into existence the deliberate manipulation of opinion and the “engineering of consent.” There are many good reasons why, as citizens and as scientists, we should be concerned with studying the ways in which human beings form their opinions and the role that social conditions play. Studies of the questions began with the interest in hypnosis aroused by the French physician Jean Martin Charcot (a teacher of Sigmund Freud) toward the end of the 19^th century.  Charcot believed that only hysterical patients could be fully hypnotised, but this view was soon challenged by two other physicians, Hyppolyte Bernheim and A. A. Liébault, who demonstrated that they could put most people under the hypnotic spell.  Bernheim proposed that hypnosis was but an extreme form of a normal psychological process which became known as “suggestibility.” …It was not long before social thinkers seized upon these discoveries as a basis for explaining numerous social phenomena, from the spread of opinion to the formation of crowds and the following of leaders.  The sociologist Gabriel Tarde summed it all up in the aphorism: “Social man is a somnambulist.” *

While we’d like to think of The Business of Pleasure as fearlessly and ceaselessly championing the battle against orthodoxy and the pursuit of independent thinking, we can all think of examples of complicity, whether for good or ill:

The celebrated author who is told by his publisher to bring a lucrative sequence of novels to an end “because Market Research says that readers will not buy in to a series with more than six books.”

Or the mighty Metallica radically changing their material under pressure from their Producer and label.  Lars Ulrich: “We made a lot of decisions based on fear… we compromised.”

And even the famously uncompromising Stephen Sondheim recognised that a degree of conformity was a pre-requisite of successful collaboration:

“Theatre is a collaborative art. What you hear is never exactly what you intended. You give up things because someone else on the team needs something more.” 

And more succinctly yet: “The ideal is art, the reality is theatre. Theatre wins.”

But sometimes you just can’t win...

I remember Bernardo Bertolucci, the director The Conformist  (SEE POSTER ABOVE) paying an unscheduled visit to a film location in North London.  We’d been working all through Sunday getting the place ready for the start of filming the next day, when the gum-chewing iconoclast behind Last Tango In Paris lopes casually across to the enormous windows at the back of the room and unties the sashes holding the curtains neatly in place.  There were audible whispers of “brilliant!” from around the crew, and we all felt we were in the presence of true cinematic genius.  All except the film’s director, Bernardo’s wife, who immediately strode over and tied the curtains back again.  There was a full minute of sheer panic, until one of the crew (doubtless destined for the Diplomatic Corps) hit upon a solution:  “Aesthetically, within the geometric lines of the room, it is absolutely perfect for the curtains to hang loose. But as the couple are gay males, the sashes must absolutely be tied back, as this reflects the restrictions society places on their sexuality.”

But conformity is longer just a human-to-human issue. Society now faces new and more complex challenges as we increasingly delegate to third party 'Agents' whose tendencies and motivations are concealed within an almost impenetrable black box:

‘Recent evidence suggests that AI agents exhibit individual and collective behaviours remarkably similar to humans across various social and cognitive tasks, including susceptibility to social pressure in text-based scenarios. A growing body of research explores whether LLMs internalize and reproduce human social biases, norms, and decision-making patterns…. The implications of the conformity bias in AI agent societies are profound and bidirectional.  Positive conformity effects could enhance coordination, stabilize group decision-making, and facilitate the emergence of beneficial social norms, critical capabilities as AI agents increasingly collaborate on complex tasks.  Conversely, excessive conformity poses significant risks: it could amplify misinformation, suppress innovative solutions, create systemic vulnerabilities to manipulation and lead to cascade failures when groups of agents converge on incorrect decisions.  Understanding these dynamics is essential as AI agents transition from isolated tools to interconnected social actors operating at unprecedented scale.’

The battle lines are drawn, and once again The Business of Pleasure will be in the vanguard: the increasingly less autonomous descendants of IBM's Deep Blue squaring up against the ever-more-relevant exhortations Ol’ Blue Eyes:

...For what is a man, what has he got?

If not himself, then he has naught

To say the things he truly feels

And not the words of one who kneels

The record shows I took the blows

And did it my way

DT

26    February 2026

*Solomon Asch, Scientific American, November 1955

**Conformity and Social Impact on AI Agents Alessandro Bellina, Giordano De Marzo and David Garcia, arXiv preprint January, 2026

***In 1992, after a 13-year investigation initiated by Pope John Paul II, the catholic church finally acknowledged it had persecuted Galileo unfairly 400 years previously.