Suppose you were completing an online survey and encountered the following warning:

The next section of the survey asks for your honest opinions about some controversial political issues. While we make every attempt to ensure your opinions are kept confidential, it is important to keep in mind that the National Security Agency does monitor the online activities of individual citizens, and these actions are beyond the study’s control.

That statement is absolutely true, but how often do we think about it? And if we do think about it, will it make any difference in our responses to the survey?

Social psychologists have been studying conformity for 80 years. Conformity refers to a change in a person’s attitude or behavior due to real or imagined pressure from another person or group. In the 1940s, using a perceptual task, Solomon Asch demonstrated how many people conform to the incorrect judgments of others. His research was followed a series of studies documenting many factors that affect the conformity rate, i.e., we conform more if we think the other group members are experts, if we like them, etc.

There are two main reasons for conformity. People use other group members as sources of information and sometimes conclude that the others are right and they are wrong. In other words, they privately accept to group’s judgment. Social psychologists call this informational social influence. In other cases, people privately believe their own judgment is correct, but they conform to gain the approval (or avoid the disapproval) of other group members. In this case, there is public compliance without private acceptance. This is called normative social influence. One way to disentangle these two forces is to do an experiment in which some participants respond publicly, while others think they are responding privately. Conformity will usually be greater in the public condition, and the difference between the two conditions represents normative social influence. However, conformity also will be greater than zero in the private condition, and this represents informational social influence.

The spiral of silence theory of German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann described the consequences of conformity for society. Due to fear of social isolation, people who think they hold minority positions will tend to remain silent in social situations, while people who think they are in the majority will be confident and vocal. Over time, the perceived consensus will drift toward the majority position, as everyone overestimates the percentage of people who hold that view. For example, if atheists are reluctant to reveal their beliefs to survey researchers, the public will underestimate the number of atheists and atheists will feel more marginalized. In extreme cases, there is evidence of pluralistic ignorance, in which the majority privately rejects a position, but mistakenly assumes that others accept it, and therefore go along with it.

A recent study by Elizabeth Stoycheff of Wayne State University measures normative social influence on the internet. It contrasts a condition in which participants are reminded that they are under surveillance with one in which they are not. The 255 participants are a representative sample of Americans recruited through Survey Systems International in January 2015. They are told they are participating in a study of attitudes toward the ongoing American bombing of Iraq and Syria. After answering questions about their political attitudes, personality traits and media use, half of them were given the above message reminding them of the possibility of government surveillance. They other half didn’t receive the message. Next they encountered a Facebook post which passed along, without comment, a fictitious, neutral ABC News article about American bombing of ISIS targets in Iraq.

The measure of self-censorship was they average of their responses to four questions: their likelihood of sharing the post, liking the post, commenting on the post, or writing a new post on the same topic. They were asked whether they approved of U. S. airstrikes in Iraq, and to estimate the average American’s attitude toward the airstrikes. The difference between these two measures determined what the author called their climate of opinion—how much they thought their attitude deviated from the majority viewpoint. Participants were also asked whether they thought government surveillance of the internet was justified.

There would be evidence of self-censorship if those participants who were reminded of surveillance were more likely to speak out when they thought the climate of opinion was friendly and less likely to speak when they thought it was hostile. Although some secondary sources have implied that this is what Stoycheff found, the actual results are more complicated than that. She divided people into three groups depending on their attitude toward surveillance: Those who thought it was justified, those who merely tolerated it, and those who thought it was unjustified. The results are shown below.

Those who thought surveillance was unjustified showed no evidence of self-censorship. They were slightly less likely to speak when under surveillance, but their likelihood of speaking was unaffected by the climate of opinion. Those who believe that government spying on citizens is unacceptable apparently refuse to be silenced even when they know the opinion climate is hostile to their views and they are reminded that they are under surveillance. Stoycheff reports that these people are also higher in political interest than the other participants.

However, those who tolerated surveillance, and especially those who thought it was justified (“because [they] have nothing to hide,”] showed evidence of self-censorship. They were more likely to speak out when they thought they were in the majority, and less likely to speak out when they thought they were in the minority. They conform in two ways. First, they acquiesce to government spying, and secondly, they censor their opinions by telling other people only what they think they want to hear.

Conformists cheat the group or society by withholding whatever information or good judgment they possess. But as Stoycheff notes, “Democracy thrives on a diversity of ideas, and self-censorship starves it.” Better outcomes will come to a group or society that creates incentives for people to reveal dissenting information. The First Amendment is an important safeguard when conformity is demanded by the government, but freedom of speech may not be sufficient if people decide that they have nothing to say.

You may also be interested in reading:

Chomsky, Greenwald and Snowden on Privacy

Are Terrorists Getting What They Want?