I don't have a deep understanding of the culture, but I trained in a dojo run by a Japanese sensei here for many years, as well as having traveled there maybe a dozen times. I think a better framing than conformity is harmony - the culture places a high value on not inconveniencing others, as just a pure social value. This (as explained to me by a Japanese citizen) is why eating on the street and other public places is taboo - you might make a mess, make someone uncomfortable from the smell, etc.
I think conformity is a very western framing of this - "there has to be a stick to think about other people". But if you stipulate that the Japanese culture values something like harmony/politeness as a first-order value, then the idea of "I will wear a mask so I don't inconvenience others" makes more sense. I also remember people there telling me pre-pandemic that sometimes you'd wear a mask if you felt like you might be getting a cold, so as to not give it to other people. That's not social pressure, it's social values.
This post seems extremely confused about what social pressure is.
Social pressure is not "you will literally, physically, be forced to do something you do not want to do."
Social pressure is: "you were taught, by society, that certain things are good and approved of, and other things are bad and disapproved of; you partially internalized these messages; you expect the people you know to have these expectations of you and to think less of you if you don't comply; you experience this as a feeling of unwelcome obligation to conform to society's standards."
In a sense, I suppose, it is a "choice", but it doesn't feel like "one's own" choice, it feels like a duty or burden.
If you try to put down that duty or burden, you don't literally die, but you experience social disapproval, which hurts in itself, and which indirectly can cause material harms sometimes.
The severity of the material harms from social disapproval are hard to measure and may vary a lot based on individual situation; that's an essential component of how social pressure *works*, that nobody is quite sure how bad it will be if they defy it.
This is basically the same complaint I have with your Szaszianism.
"I feel compelled to do this" and "I want to do this" are the same to you, but they feel entirely different on the inside. One hurts, one doesn't.
I don't see why you are so unwilling to accept the existence of subjectively different experiences of agency.
Or do you admit that they feel different, but...not care about that difference? For what purpose? What exactly is the claim being made here?
Agreed. Bryan might not feel it because he probably is not typical, but not fitting in an doing what everyone else is doing and expects exacts an emotional toll.
Its like showing up to party where suit and tie are required and you are wearing more casual clothes. You just always feel like everyone is looking at you and you are out of place.
During COVID my area had a mask mandate and I would go maskless sometimes just to work out my non conformist muscles. It was usually just me maskless and a couple of old ladies at the grocery store. I definitely felt like all eyes were on me and judging me. I still did it but I felt the inclination to conform.
We all understand evolutionary psychology. Some peoples brains are wired to punish nonconformity.
Try to imagine that for many people social unconformity is like having an electric shock collar that goes off whenever you get out of line. Perhaps for some groups that shock collars are more common and have higher voltages.
I think for Bryan, social disapproval doesn't hurt in itself. That's why he only focuses on material harm, and he thinks being anonymous will prevent any material harm.
I will copy paste above with the following comment.
It may be evolutionary maladaptive for everyone in a society to be immune to social pressure.
----
We all understand evolutionary psychology. Some peoples brains are wired to punish nonconformity.
Try to imagine that for many people social unconformity is like having an electric shock collar that goes off whenever you get out of line. Perhaps for some groups that shock collars are more common and have higher voltages.
Even if nobody physically does anything to you, being told everywhere to put on a mask when you go maskless could count as "pressure". But Bryan has said he was easily able to go maskless without being bothered.
He's a foreigner, and is allowed to get away with it. Because foreigners are expected to be weird and non-conformist and rude ("gaijin"). And because very very few Japanese are comfortable speaking English.
A Japanese person would be chastised in the street.
I live in the Inner Richmond neighborhood of San Francisco, a majority Asian (Chinese, to be specific) neighborhood. The Asians are almost entirely masked, while the whites are not. The mask-wearing is often linearly separable along ethnic lines: the Asians of all ages wear the masks, both outside and indoors, even driving alone in their cars, while the whites do not.
I find it marginally irritating, if I'm being honest. A free and democratic people should show their faces to one another in public. But I suppose there is little I can do.
Not wearing a mask can also be a sign of "conformity." I have a friend who lives in Norway, who has poor health, feels vulnerable, and is afraid of getting covid. Yet she will not wear a mask when she goes out, even though she would feel safer with one. Once the Norwegian government told its citizens they no longer needed to wear a mask, just about everyone there stopped wearing a mask, immediately. Social harmony seems to be about as strong a value in Norway as it seems to be in Japan, so now that it has become unusual and somewhat socially disruptive to wear a mask in Norway, my friend won't wear one even though she is afraid of the virus and wishes everyone were wearing one.
I read that mask wearing is still high in Korea because it is a looks-obsessed society. The masks provide a relief to women (mostly) who do not look perfect. Perhaps Japan is the same?
Japan very nearly canceled the Olympics due to Covid after delaying them for a year. Over 90% of the athletes were fully vaccinated, and they were still made to test regularly and double mask outdoors, and there was public outrage at what a huge risk this posed to the Japanese people. Even some western journalists who cover Japan warned that a super-spreader event was in the offing. And then only a handful of people even tested positive during it.
The amateur "spent 2 weeks in a country" sociology gets old really fast. You're basically just throwing around personal anecdotes but pretend that they're more than that.
Pretty much everyone believes their personal anecdotes and superficial thoughts are valuable, that's not special. What's special is having the forethought to realize that line of thinking is essentially worthless.
So Noah presents data (measures of individualism) you present "saw lots of people wear masks". And your conclusion is you're right, data is wrong.
This is a blog. Blogs are precisely the place to share informal observations and ask questions. "Hey, my eyes contradict the data. What's going on here?"
You're operating under the idea that there are a set of "rules" and then if you violate those rules there will be "consequences" with varying and escalating levels of "enforcement." You as an individual basically decide what rules you are or aren't willing to violate without that incentive structure.
This is very western.
Japan relies intensely on social pressure to induce conformity. Right and wrong aren't always a set rules so much as "this is what people are doing, this is what's expected of me."
Because it's able to induce compliance through social pressure, it relies less on rules and enforcement. People in Japan don't think as much in terms of "this is what I can get away with." To even have that thought would make you a bad Japanese.
One thing I noticed in the west is that Asians were the more draconian COVID enforcers. I think this was in part because the idea that people wouldn't voluntarily comply to social norms just overwhelms them. In Japan you can just say, "it's a few foreigners who will be gone soon", but in the west non compliance was more widespread.
Lastly, the way Japanese do enforce against non-compliers matters more if you're really trying to be a part of their society, not a tourist. For instance, your masklessness probably wouldn't be tolerated if you wanted to get a job in Japan, they would expect you to comply on the job. Similarly, a lot of retaliation can be of a passive aggressive exclusionary kind. They don't tell you your being judged, but then they exclude you.
P.S. Sam notes that this conformity has a positive basis (I'm a good person being nice to others) even if the implementation is sometimes useless to counterproductive (like wearing masks).
Also possible that Japanese people are just generally more concerned about Covid... Wearing masks doesn't necessarily have to mean conformity. It's just one variable.
My sense is that the Japanese are Team Players. They genuinely want to do what is best for society, not optimize their own narrow self interest, and this is reinforced by the - largely correct - feeling that most other people are holding up their end of the same bargain.
This may, to an outsider, look like, and produce outcomes similar to conformism. But it's actually a very different thing.
I think the way to tell the difference is if they keep ding the responsible thing when no one is watching. From what I hear, they do.
Finally a little humility from Bryan! I agree with much (but not all) of your views, Bryan, but you're always so sure of yourself that it can be hard to take you seriously sometimes. Perhaps, if you every so often mentioned something that made you change your mind (like this post!), it wouldn't seem as if you're just always reinforcing your own views.
From people I met in college, they said masking was something that many Japanese already did from time to time due to pollution, depending on which city you were talking about and that it was not as foreign to them as to most westerners. The Chinese do this too in many of their most polluted cities that have terrible air quality.
Except for the rural areas where garbage and agricultural waste is burned openly there is little severe air pollution in Japan. Tokyo has cleaner air than LA despite having 3x the population.
I don't have a deep understanding of the culture, but I trained in a dojo run by a Japanese sensei here for many years, as well as having traveled there maybe a dozen times. I think a better framing than conformity is harmony - the culture places a high value on not inconveniencing others, as just a pure social value. This (as explained to me by a Japanese citizen) is why eating on the street and other public places is taboo - you might make a mess, make someone uncomfortable from the smell, etc.
I think conformity is a very western framing of this - "there has to be a stick to think about other people". But if you stipulate that the Japanese culture values something like harmony/politeness as a first-order value, then the idea of "I will wear a mask so I don't inconvenience others" makes more sense. I also remember people there telling me pre-pandemic that sometimes you'd wear a mask if you felt like you might be getting a cold, so as to not give it to other people. That's not social pressure, it's social values.
This post seems extremely confused about what social pressure is.
Social pressure is not "you will literally, physically, be forced to do something you do not want to do."
Social pressure is: "you were taught, by society, that certain things are good and approved of, and other things are bad and disapproved of; you partially internalized these messages; you expect the people you know to have these expectations of you and to think less of you if you don't comply; you experience this as a feeling of unwelcome obligation to conform to society's standards."
In a sense, I suppose, it is a "choice", but it doesn't feel like "one's own" choice, it feels like a duty or burden.
If you try to put down that duty or burden, you don't literally die, but you experience social disapproval, which hurts in itself, and which indirectly can cause material harms sometimes.
The severity of the material harms from social disapproval are hard to measure and may vary a lot based on individual situation; that's an essential component of how social pressure *works*, that nobody is quite sure how bad it will be if they defy it.
This is basically the same complaint I have with your Szaszianism.
"I feel compelled to do this" and "I want to do this" are the same to you, but they feel entirely different on the inside. One hurts, one doesn't.
I don't see why you are so unwilling to accept the existence of subjectively different experiences of agency.
Or do you admit that they feel different, but...not care about that difference? For what purpose? What exactly is the claim being made here?
Agreed. Bryan might not feel it because he probably is not typical, but not fitting in an doing what everyone else is doing and expects exacts an emotional toll.
Its like showing up to party where suit and tie are required and you are wearing more casual clothes. You just always feel like everyone is looking at you and you are out of place.
During COVID my area had a mask mandate and I would go maskless sometimes just to work out my non conformist muscles. It was usually just me maskless and a couple of old ladies at the grocery store. I definitely felt like all eyes were on me and judging me. I still did it but I felt the inclination to conform.
We all understand evolutionary psychology. Some peoples brains are wired to punish nonconformity.
Try to imagine that for many people social unconformity is like having an electric shock collar that goes off whenever you get out of line. Perhaps for some groups that shock collars are more common and have higher voltages.
I think for Bryan, social disapproval doesn't hurt in itself. That's why he only focuses on material harm, and he thinks being anonymous will prevent any material harm.
I will copy paste above with the following comment.
It may be evolutionary maladaptive for everyone in a society to be immune to social pressure.
----
We all understand evolutionary psychology. Some peoples brains are wired to punish nonconformity.
Try to imagine that for many people social unconformity is like having an electric shock collar that goes off whenever you get out of line. Perhaps for some groups that shock collars are more common and have higher voltages.
Even if nobody physically does anything to you, being told everywhere to put on a mask when you go maskless could count as "pressure". But Bryan has said he was easily able to go maskless without being bothered.
He's a foreigner, and is allowed to get away with it. Because foreigners are expected to be weird and non-conformist and rude ("gaijin"). And because very very few Japanese are comfortable speaking English.
A Japanese person would be chastised in the street.
Testing
I live in the Inner Richmond neighborhood of San Francisco, a majority Asian (Chinese, to be specific) neighborhood. The Asians are almost entirely masked, while the whites are not. The mask-wearing is often linearly separable along ethnic lines: the Asians of all ages wear the masks, both outside and indoors, even driving alone in their cars, while the whites do not.
I find it marginally irritating, if I'm being honest. A free and democratic people should show their faces to one another in public. But I suppose there is little I can do.
Not wearing a mask can also be a sign of "conformity." I have a friend who lives in Norway, who has poor health, feels vulnerable, and is afraid of getting covid. Yet she will not wear a mask when she goes out, even though she would feel safer with one. Once the Norwegian government told its citizens they no longer needed to wear a mask, just about everyone there stopped wearing a mask, immediately. Social harmony seems to be about as strong a value in Norway as it seems to be in Japan, so now that it has become unusual and somewhat socially disruptive to wear a mask in Norway, my friend won't wear one even though she is afraid of the virus and wishes everyone were wearing one.
I read that mask wearing is still high in Korea because it is a looks-obsessed society. The masks provide a relief to women (mostly) who do not look perfect. Perhaps Japan is the same?
Japan very nearly canceled the Olympics due to Covid after delaying them for a year. Over 90% of the athletes were fully vaccinated, and they were still made to test regularly and double mask outdoors, and there was public outrage at what a huge risk this posed to the Japanese people. Even some western journalists who cover Japan warned that a super-spreader event was in the offing. And then only a handful of people even tested positive during it.
The amateur "spent 2 weeks in a country" sociology gets old really fast. You're basically just throwing around personal anecdotes but pretend that they're more than that.
Pretty much everyone believes their personal anecdotes and superficial thoughts are valuable, that's not special. What's special is having the forethought to realize that line of thinking is essentially worthless.
So Noah presents data (measures of individualism) you present "saw lots of people wear masks". And your conclusion is you're right, data is wrong.
This is a blog. Blogs are precisely the place to share informal observations and ask questions. "Hey, my eyes contradict the data. What's going on here?"
"I defy the data" can be a virtue of rationalism:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vrHRcEDMjZcx5Yfru/i-defy-the-data
You're operating under the idea that there are a set of "rules" and then if you violate those rules there will be "consequences" with varying and escalating levels of "enforcement." You as an individual basically decide what rules you are or aren't willing to violate without that incentive structure.
This is very western.
Japan relies intensely on social pressure to induce conformity. Right and wrong aren't always a set rules so much as "this is what people are doing, this is what's expected of me."
Because it's able to induce compliance through social pressure, it relies less on rules and enforcement. People in Japan don't think as much in terms of "this is what I can get away with." To even have that thought would make you a bad Japanese.
One thing I noticed in the west is that Asians were the more draconian COVID enforcers. I think this was in part because the idea that people wouldn't voluntarily comply to social norms just overwhelms them. In Japan you can just say, "it's a few foreigners who will be gone soon", but in the west non compliance was more widespread.
Lastly, the way Japanese do enforce against non-compliers matters more if you're really trying to be a part of their society, not a tourist. For instance, your masklessness probably wouldn't be tolerated if you wanted to get a job in Japan, they would expect you to comply on the job. Similarly, a lot of retaliation can be of a passive aggressive exclusionary kind. They don't tell you your being judged, but then they exclude you.
P.S. Sam notes that this conformity has a positive basis (I'm a good person being nice to others) even if the implementation is sometimes useless to counterproductive (like wearing masks).
Also possible that Japanese people are just generally more concerned about Covid... Wearing masks doesn't necessarily have to mean conformity. It's just one variable.
My sense is that the Japanese are Team Players. They genuinely want to do what is best for society, not optimize their own narrow self interest, and this is reinforced by the - largely correct - feeling that most other people are holding up their end of the same bargain.
This may, to an outsider, look like, and produce outcomes similar to conformism. But it's actually a very different thing.
I think the way to tell the difference is if they keep ding the responsible thing when no one is watching. From what I hear, they do.
I wonder what causes conformity. At some point, someone had to be the first one to decide to wear a mask at all times
"second-guess the scope of my understanding"
Finally a little humility from Bryan! I agree with much (but not all) of your views, Bryan, but you're always so sure of yourself that it can be hard to take you seriously sometimes. Perhaps, if you every so often mentioned something that made you change your mind (like this post!), it wouldn't seem as if you're just always reinforcing your own views.
I'm curious to hear from people familiar with both China and Japan - is this kind of conformity as prevalent in China as in Japan?
My impression is "no" (Chinese are more laid-back and individualistic), but I've spent very little time in China, so maybe I'm mistaken.
From people I met in college, they said masking was something that many Japanese already did from time to time due to pollution, depending on which city you were talking about and that it was not as foreign to them as to most westerners. The Chinese do this too in many of their most polluted cities that have terrible air quality.
Except for the rural areas where garbage and agricultural waste is burned openly there is little severe air pollution in Japan. Tokyo has cleaner air than LA despite having 3x the population.
https://www.numbeo.com/pollution/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Japan&city1=Tokyo&country2=United+States&city2=Los+Angeles%2C+CA
>A while back, I claimed to possess “a profound understanding of human nature.” Two weeks in Japan made me second-guess the scope of my understanding.
Wow - some self-awareness and hint of humility. Nice to see!