Imagine being a starling in one of those massive dark clouds they create when swarming; Intensely focused, eyes forward, keeping up, swooping madly. So involved in this doing that we never look around and say: “What the heck are we doing?”. That would be doing it wrong. Interrupting automatic behavior is kicking yourself out of the game and likely paying some price for it.

There are many times in human life where it’s almost impossible to opt-out of preset behavior flows. The thing is, our sense of autonomy and free will often mask the inflexible and robotic within us. Imagine yourself walking into work, greeting familiar people. How much could you change the way you do that?

First, dress differently. Change your stride, your expression, and tone. Say surprising things, speak uncomfortable truths, use no templated behavior. In a meeting, don’t laugh with the group. Laugh without the group. Choose body language that conflicts with those around you.

It sounds like protracted, fingernails on the chalkboard misery, doesn’t it? It sounds like exhausting resistance to the flow. It sounds like asking for trouble. Please imagine how hard it would be for you to actually do that. You are feeling the enormous power and weight of automatic behavior, it is a tidal force that sweeps us along with it wherever it goes naturally. It is a hurricane gale if you walk against it. There’s enormous stress in clashing with social expectations.

But walking into work isn’t just waltzing past a few strangers, it’s a series of complex, patterned encounters.

Relationships with family, friends, and workmates quickly become codified. They develop a pattern that eventually becomes almost impossible to alter. If you pay close attention you can feel yourself in these moments of interaction morphing instantly into a modified version of you, especially adapted to this specific person. In their company, you have a well-understood way of greeting, a style of listening and a way of holding yourself. Buried in the same file are your ways of seeking information from them, making jokes, expressing camaraderie, or concern, etc. etc. You probably have different versions of these things prepared for many specific people. You don’t think about it. You didn’t plan these things… they grew automatically from your chemistry and relationship as the two of you worked out how to be with each other.

I’m just pointing out how much of life is evoked, context-driven behavior. It’s something observable that we all do, it’s global, it’s innate human behavior. In groups, we subconsciously monitor the environment for a sense of what it’s proper to be doing right now. We react instantly to signals during social interaction and display appropriate poses and expressions to answer those signals.

This constant flow of social mirroring and signaling doesn’t usually feel difficult or threatening. It doesn’t usually even feel like something we are doing. Not until there’s an uncontrollable breach in your display. Imagine throwing up, farting loudly or faceplanting in your nice clothes on your way into the conference room with “the team”. Inside us a sudden horror movie shriek, as we feel ourselves plummet into the social shame basement. We instantly begin emergency repairs with fevered apologies, explanations, and attempts to signal a return to normal. Shame is never more than a stupid comment or a burp away, and shame burns. It burns more than seems reasonable or proportionate. Shame hurts because, in spite of our apparent confidence, there is human machinery in us that cares a whole lot about what people think.

It’s very challenging to observe this our constant monitoring and mirroring of every group we are in, the way we change stance and attitude, distance, angle,  facial expression and tone of voice. How we adjust our clothing and body language. Every person is a signal and we morph ourselves like camouflaging cuttlefish at every public moment to send the correct signal. This unconscious, automatic behavior can interact with conscious choice but it does so as little as possible.

Social interaction is a seamless matrix of automatic behavior, making it all but invisible. Anything you notice has to stand out against a contrasting background and human behavior IS our background. Your entire life in proximity to others is shaped by these autopilot primate rules of engagement. The pressure they exert is surprising.

This video is from Candid Camera long ago but it’s amazing. Watch these people completely mess with the minds of innocent strangers.

This really makes us look like puppets, doesn’t it? And you have to wonder what weird behaviors have us turning in circles and taking our hats off and putting them right back on again except that nobody is pretending in order to prank us. Famous old-school psychological tests showed that most people would deny the evidence of their own senses if others claimed to see something different and that many “decent people” would willingly torture an innocent person if simply pressured to by an authority figure. This is what Arthur Koestler meant when he said that more of mankind’s horrors come from self-negating behaviors than self-asserting behaviors. Being cooperative is a certain number of steps from just following orders.

 

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