Groupthink and Peer Pressure Make It Taboo for Neuroscientists to Put Two and Two Together

Why do so many neuroscientists go far astray in their dogmatic declarations about the brain? To understand the speech tendencies of neuroscientists, we must understand the environments that create and employ such scientists. Neuroscientists are created in university departments that are ideological enclaves. An ideological enclave is some environment where almost everyone believes in some ideology that the majority of human beings do not profess. Different departments of a university may tend to be places where different ideologies are concentrated.

A seminary is an example of an ideological enclave. A seminary is an institution where people are trained to be ministers or priests of some particular religion. A university graduate school program (one issuing masters degrees and PhD's in some academic specialty) may also be an example of an ideological enclave. Just as a seminary trains people to think in one particular way, and to hold a particular set of unproven beliefs, many a university graduate program may train people to think in a particular way, and to hold a particular set of unproven beliefs. Neuroscience graduate school programs tend to train people to believe that all mental phenomena have a cause that is purely neural, and that your mind is merely the activity of your neurons. This strange belief is not a belief professed by the majority of human beings.

It would be incredibly hard for any ideological enclave to enforce its belief ideology if the enclave got its members by some random selection process that gave it new members reflecting the thinking of the general population. Instead, things are much easier for the ideological enclave. There is what we can call a magnet effect by which the ideological enclave only gets new trainees when people choose to join the enclave. This guarantees that each new set of trainees will tend to be people favoring the ideology of the enclave. The great majority of the people signing up to be trained in the ideological enclave will be those attracted to its ideology. The great majority of the people signing up to be trained in a theological seminary will be those who favor the theology being taught in that seminary. Similarly, the great majority of the people signing up for a university graduate program in neuroscience or evolutionary biology will be people favoring the belief dogmas popular in such programs.

Once a person starts being trained in an ideological enclave, he will find relentless social pressure to conform to the ideology of that enclave. This pressure will continue for years. The pressure will be applied by authorities who usually passed through years of training and belief conditioning by the ideological enclave, or a similar ideological enclave elsewhere. In a seminary such authorities are ministers or priests, and in a university graduate school program such authorities are professors or instructors. Finally, after years of belief conditioning the person who signed up for the training will be anointed as a new authority himself. In the university graduate school program, this occurs when something like a master's degree or a PhD or a professorship is granted. In a seminary, this may occur when someone becomes a minister or priest.

Groupthink is a tendency for some conformist social unit to have overconfidence in its decisions or belief customs, or unshakable faith in such things. Groupthink is worsened by any situation in which only those with some type of credential (available only from some ideological enclave) are regarded as fit to offer a credible judgment on some topic. In groupthink situations, an illusion of consensus may be helped by self-censorship (in which those having opinions differing from the group ideology keep their contrary opinions to themselves, for fear of being ostracized within the group). In groupthink situations, belief conformity may also be helped by so-called mindguards, who work to prevent those in the group from becoming aware of contrarian opinions, alternate options or opposing observations. In an academic community such mindguards exist in the form of peer-reviewers and academic editors who prevent the publication of opinions and data contrary to the prevailing group ideology. We saw an example of such conformity enforcement in neuroscience not long ago when an “outrage mob” of 900 petitioners forced the retraction of a neuroscience paper which seemed to have no sin worse than contrarian thinking.

For the person who completes the program of a university graduate school program, and gets his master's degree or PhD, is that the end of the conformist social influence, the end of the pressure to believe and think in a particular way? Not at all. Instead, the “follow the herd” effect and the pressure to tow the “party line” of the belief community typically continues for additional decades. The newly minted PhD rarely goes off on his own to become an independent thinker marching to his own drummer, outside of the heavy influence of the belief community. Instead, such a person usually becomes a kind of captive of a belief community. The newly minted PhD will very often get a job working for the very ideological enclave that trained him, a particular academic department of a university. Or, he may end up employed by some very similar academic department of some other university, a place that is an ideological enclave just like the one in which he was trained. Such employment typically lasts for decades, during which someone may be stuck in a kind of echo chamber in which everyone parrots the same talking points. So when there is groupthink and ideological conformity in some academic specialty, peer pressure can continue to act for decades on someone like a neuroscientist or a string theorist or an evolutionary biologist.

Such peer pressure can be something that tells people they are  supposed to think in one way, and may also be something that tells people they should not think in some other way. The enforcement of belief taboos and speech taboos is one of the main tendencies of ideological enclaves and belief communities. Such taboos are promoted by those interested in preserving the ideological cohesiveness of the belief community. The belief community of neuroscientists enforces thinking taboos that can prevent neuroscientists from reaching conclusions that follow rather obviously from particular observations. Such taboos can make it culturally forbidden for neuroscientists to put two and two together. “Put two and two together” is a phrase referring to reaching an obvious conclusion. Let me give some examples where belief taboos prevent neuroscientists from putting two and two together.

Example #1: Near-death Experiences and Apparitions

Human beings often have near-death experiences. In such experiences people very often report floating out of their bodies and observing their bodies from a distance. It is quite common for extremely vivid near-death experiences to occur during cardiac arrest, when brain activity has shut down because the heart has stopped. The type of accounts given by those who have near-death experiences tend to have very similar features, the type of items listed on the Greyson Scale. These include things such as passing through a tunnel, encountering deceased relatives, feelings of peace and joy, being told to go back when reaching a border or boundary between life and death, and so forth. Near-death experiences do not have the kind of random content we would expect from hallucinations. Near-death experiences also very often occur when any brain hallucination should be impossible, because the heart has stopped and electrical activity in the brain has stopped. When people report having near-death experiences when their hearts are stopped, they can often recall details of the activity of medical personnel working nearby them, details they should not have been able to observe given their deeply unconscious medical condition.

In addition, perfectly healthy humans are often surprised to see an apparition of someone they did not know was dead, only to soon find out later that the corresponding person did die, typically on the same day and hour as the apparition was seen. You can read about 165 such cases here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Moreover, a single apparition is often seen by multiple witnesses, as discussed in 50+ cases here and here and here and here.

There is a very clear conclusion that must be reached when someone puts two and two together regarding what we know about near-death experiences and apparitions. The conclusion is that human consciousness is not actually a product of the brain, and can continue even when the brain has stopped working because of cardiac arrest. But to conclude such a thing would be to violate a belief taboo enforced by groupthink and peer pressure in the neuroscientist belief community. The belief taboo is that you cannot believe in any type of human soul, but must believe that all human mental activity comes purely from neurons. So in this case the social taboo (enforced by groupthink and peer pressure) prevents neuroscientists from putting two and two together.

Example #2: The Lack of Anything in Brains Suitable for Long-Term Memory Storage or Instant Memory Retrieval

Humans are capable of accurately remembering episodic memories and learned information for more than 60 years. Humans also routinely show the ability to instantly recall information learned many years ago, given a single prompt such as a question or the mention of a name or place. But we know of nothing in the brain that can explain such abilities.

A computer hard disk may read and write information by using a spinning disk and a read-write head, but we know of no similar thing in the brain. We know of nothing in the brain that seems like a unit specialized for reading stored information, nor do we know of anything in the brain that seems like some unit specialized for writing information. No one has ever discovered any type of encoding system by which any of the vast varieties of information humans remember could ever be translated into neural states or synapse states. Nor has anyone ever discovered anything like some indexing system that might explain how humans could instantly recall things.

Although it is often claimed that memories are stored in synapses, the proteins that make up synapses are very short-lived, having lifetimes of only a few weeks or less. There is nothing in the brain that is a plausible candidate for a place where memories might be stored for either several years or six decades. Humans are able to remember very large bodies of information with 100% accuracy, as we see on the stage when we see an actor recall all of the lines of the role of Hamlet without error or all of the lines and notes of the roles of Wagner's Siegfried or Tristan without error. But such 100% recall of large bodies of learned information should be impossible if it occurred through neural activity, given the high levels of signal noise in a brain. It has been estimated that when a neural signal travels from one neuron to another in a cortex, the signal transmission occurs with far less than 50% reliability. Other than the genetic information in DNA, no one has ever found any sign of stored information in a brain, such as memory information that could be read from a dead organism after it died.

There is a very clear conclusion that must be reached when someone puts two and two together regarding what we know about the limits of the human brain. The conclusion is that the brain cannot be the storage place of human memories. But to conclude such a thing would be to violate a belief taboo enforced by groupthink and peer pressure in the neuroscientist belief community. The belief taboo is that you cannot believe that any major facet of the human mind comes from something other than the brain, but must believe that all human mental activity comes purely from neurons. So in this case the social taboo (enforced by conformist groupthink and peer pressure) prevents neuroscientists from putting two and two together.

Example #3: The Results of Hemispherectomy Operations or Even Greater Brain Tissue Loss

A hemispherectomy operation is an operation in which half of a patient's brain is removed, typically to stop very bad seizures the person is suffering from. Hemispherectomy operations provide an excellent test for dogmas regarding the brain. From the dogma that the brain is the cause of human intelligence and the storage place of memories, we should expect that suddenly removing half of someone's brain should cause at least a 50% drop in intelligence, along with a massive loss of memories and learned information.

Nothing of the sort happened when such operations were done. You can read about the exact effects of hemispherectomy operations by reading my posts here and here and here and here. In most cases hemispherectomy operation does not cause a significant reduction in intelligence as measured by IQ tests. In quite a few cases, someone did better in an IQ test after half of his brain was removed in a hemispherectomy operation. Hemispherectomy operations also do not seem to cause major loss of memories.

Brain-ravaging natural diseases sometimes provide an even better test of dogmas about the brain. Such diseases often remove much more than half of a person's brain. Astonishingly, the result is often a person of normal intelligence and sometimes even above-average intelligence. The physician John Lorber studied many cases of people who had lost the great majority of their brains, mostly because of a disease called hydrocephalus. Lorber was astonished that more than half of such patients had above-average intelligence. Then there are cases such as the case of the French person who managed to long hold a civil servant job, even though he had almost no brain. 

There is a very clear conclusion that must be reached when someone puts two and two together regarding what we know about how loss of half or most of the brain has little effect on intelligence or memory. The conclusion is that the brain cannot be the storage place of human memories, and cannot be the source of human intelligence. But to conclude such a thing would be to violate a belief taboo enforced by groupthink and peer pressure in the neuroscientist belief community. The belief taboo is that you cannot believe that any major facet of the human mind comes from something other than the brain, but must believe that all human mental activity comes purely from neurons. So in this case the social taboo (enforced by an echo chamber of groupthink and peer pressure) prevents neuroscientists from putting two and two together.

In this regard we may compare neuroscience departments of universities to some bizarre pharmaceutical manufacturer that allows its researchers to note when the company's pill causes a person to collapse, turn white, and stop breathing, but makes it a taboo for researchers to put two and two together and conclude that the company's pill is dangerous. 

A Diagram of Explanatory Dysfunction in Academia

Below is a diagram that attempts to illustrate some of the explanatory problems afflicting colleges and universities. A major factor in such problems are what we may call achievement legends.

       Click to open in a separate tab                 

An achievement legend is a story that is repeatedly told in the classrooms of colleges and universities, a story claiming without proof that some wonderful progress was made by scientists. Such legends include the ones below and many others:

• The story that the origin of species and the origin of humanity were successfully explained by the nineteenth century biologist Charles Darwin.
  
• The story that neuroscientists have been able to figure out where the human mind comes from and how human memory works, by studying the human brain.
  
• The story that the “book of life” was discovered in the middle of the twentieth century, when scientists found some molecule that contained a blueprint or recipe for making human beings.
  
• The story that scientists have been been able to figure out important truths about the evolution of the universe, by coming up with ideas such as dark matter and primordial exponential cosmic inflation (not to be confused with ordinary expansion).
  

All of these stories meet the definition of legend, which is “a traditional story sometimes regarded as historical but unauthenticated.” None of these claims of achievement has been proven. There are very substantial reasons for rejecting each one of them. But these stories of great achievements keep being told again and again by our professors. One of the hardest things to dispel is a dubious achievement legend once it has spread. Such legends provide prestige boosts to various people in academia, and once a person has been hooked on an intoxicating conceit, it becomes incredibly hard for such a person to give it up and adopt a more realistic viewpoint about his relatively modest state of knowledge.

These achievement legends are pillars of a worldview that is predominant at colleges and universities. The worldview is based on the idea that the most important realities such as life and mind are explained by matter, and that such realities arose from blind accidental processes. Believing in the smug achievement legends, those who hold this worldview believe that scientists are making excellent progress in coming up with purely material explanations for life and mental phenomena.

But such a worldview is contradicted by a gigantic number of observational facts. Such facts and observations can be divided into two different categories: the paranormal and the not-at-all-spooky. In the paranormal category are a host of observations that mainstream professors may dismiss as “impossible,” even though they are massively reported. These include things such as apparition sightings, deathbed visions, near-death experiences, anecdotal accounts of clairvoyance, extremely high scores on tests of extrasensory perception (such as we would never expect any human to get by chance), photos of dramatic recurring patterns in mysterious orbs, and so forth. But there is also a huge number of "not at all spooky" observations that stand in opposition to the prevailing academic worldview. Among these are observations such as these:

1. Low-level observations indicating that DNA does not have and cannot have a blueprint or recipe for making a human.
   
2. Innumerable observations of incredibly organized biological complexity vastly more fine-tuned than anything that can reasonably be explained as a result of chance.
   
3. Observations proving that brain tissue does not have the long-term information storage capability it would need to have if prevailing ideas about brains and minds are correct.
   
4. Observations proving that massive damage to brains often has only slight effects on mind and memory, contrary to what we would expect under the dogma that the mind is merely the product of the brain, and the dogma that memories are stored in brains.
   
5. Observations establishing that the universe has many types of physical fine-tuning such as we would not expect under prevailing academic assumptions.
   

These are part of a massive body of evidence that defies and discredits the worldview prevailing among the professors of academia. But such professors do a very good job of keeping their classrooms and journals and textbooks as places where such evidence is not discussed. Professors exert a kind of de facto censorship in which such opposing evidence is excluded from the sheltered world of academia. The “no entry” symbols in my diagram illustrate this type of de facto censorship.

The evidence I just discussed gives rise to contrarian viewpoints that differ from the prevailing worldview held by academic professors. But there is little or no fair discussion of such contrarian viewpoints in the regimented literature and classroom presentations of academia. If there is any discussion of such viewpoints, an academic authority will typically make sure to label the contrarian thinkers with various defamatory or deprecatory labels designed to prevent anyone from taking their opinions seriously.

Academia produces a huge flow of research and literature. But the research and literature is largely what I call dogma-driven. Dogma-driven research is research designed to reassure professors that they are on the right track, and that their grand explanatory pretensions are justified. Examples include the following:

• Innumerable papers presenting different variations of Guth's theory of primordial cosmic inflation, most of which are designed to bolster our confidence in such a theory.
  
• Innumerable papers speculating about dark matter and dark energy, two things that have never been observed.
  
• Countless papers trying to shore up the doctrine of common descent, by presenting 1001 different scenarios describing inheritance paths that life could have taken to progress through Darwinian evolution.
  
• Thousands of brain scanning studies, designed to provide evidence for claims that the brain is the source of mental phenomena or the storage place of memories.
  
• Thousands of papers presenting variations of the unverified theory of supersymmetry.
  

Theory-biased analysis occurs both in journals and in textbooks. The observational facts are all passed through the prism of existing theories, which are often based on smug achievement legends. There will be either no discussion of a vast number of observational facts conflicting with such theories, or the discussion will be very skimpy and jaundiced. Reasonable alternative explanations will not be discussed, or will be discussed in some skimpy deprecatory manner. 

The result of such research is all too often unimpressive. A significant fraction of all research findings reported in scientific journals cannot be reproduced. The problem was highlighted in a widely cited 2005 paper by John Ioannidis entitled, “Why Most Published Research Studies Are False.” 

A scientist named C. Glenn Begley and his colleagues tried to reproduce 53 published studies called “ground-breaking.” He asked the scientists who wrote the papers to help, by providing the exact materials to publish the results. Begley and his colleagues were only able to reproduce 6 of the 53 experiments. In 2011 Bayer reported similar results. They tried to reproduce 67 medical studies, and were only able to reproduce them 25 percent of the time.

But a reader of science news sites would hardly guess that such problems exist. Every week such sites seem to report a glorious march of progress, and make it sound as if wonderful breakthroughs are occurring almost every week.  The problem is that weak scientific research and analysis is uncritically trumpeted.

Part of the problem is university press offices, which nowadays are shameless in exaggerating the importance of research done at their university. They know the more some locally arising scientific research is hyped, the more glory and attendees will flow to their university.

A scientific paper reached the following conclusions, indicating a huge hype and exaggeration crisis both among the authors of scientific papers and the media that reports on such papers:

"Thirty-four percent of academic studies and 48% of media articles used language that reviewers considered too strong for their strength of causal inference....Fifty-eight percent of media articles were found to have inaccurately reported the question, results, intervention, or population of the academic study."

Exacerbating this problem is an economic situation in which there is a huge monetary motivation for hyping second-rate research, to make it sound like some glorious breakthrough. Web sites that report science news have ads on their pages. The more users click on a particular page, the more money the web site makes from ad revenue. Given such a situation, there is a huge motivation for web sites to hype science research.  You won't click on some headline of "Another doubtful animal study with too small a sample." But you may click on a misleading headline of, "Amazing study unveils the secret of how memory works."  And once you make such a click, some web site will make money from some ad on the page you clicked on. So the science news hype and exaggeration keeps flowing full blast. 

Almost every day in the science news you can find examples of hyped-up headlines that are inaccurate. The glaring example I find on today's ScienceDaily.com is a story with the extremely false headline "Strongest evidence yet that neutrinos explain how the universe exists." The long-standing matter-antimatter asymmetry mystery is that the Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter (protons and electrons) and antimatter (antiprotons and positrons), in incredible densities denser than a neutron star. Since matter and antimatter destroy each other upon contact, forming into only photons of energy,  the Big Bang should have left nothing but photons of energy.  This problem cannot at all be solved by any possible finding about neutrinos, mere "ghost particles" that are millions of times less massive than electrons, which are 1836 times less massive than protons. When you read the story you will find zero evidence justifying the headline. 

In many an area of science, researchers are mostly spinning their wheels, making little progress.  A hundred promising leads are not being followed up, because professors don't want to find out about what such leads suggest, which is often that the cherished tenets of such professors are dead wrong. Meanwhile there are endless poor papers inspired by dubious theories, because professors want to be reassured that they are on the right track, and that their beloved dogmas are correct. Much too little real explanatory progress is being made, but you would never know it from reading the "hype almost anything that moves" science press, which seems to trumpet almost any dubious "glorify our guys" press release coming from a university press office, while only very rarely applying critical scrutiny to such claims.

The Sociological Reasons Why Bad Explanations Persist in Academia

A person wishing to convince you that brains make minds may fall back on a kind of argument from authority. He will point out that most neuroscientists maintain that brains make minds, and ask: how could all of these revered authorities be so wrong?

Such an argument will have little weight to the person who studies either of these things: the history of highly erroneous teachings made by esteemed authorities, and the sociology of groupthink and social conformity. Let's look at the first of these things. It is a fact that during the past 100 years there have been some important cases of expert opinion that was not only wrong, but wrong with disastrous consequences.

Here are a few examples: 

• Before the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, almost of all his advisers told John Kennedy the invasion would succeed; but it failed miserably, and helped sow the seeds of the Cuban Missile Crisis that put the world on the brink of nuclear war.
• President Lyndon Johnson's brainy Ivy League advisers kept telling him to pursue the Vietnam War full-blast; but the war ended in defeat for America, with a gigantic unnecessary loss of life for both the US and the Vietnamese.
• For decades before World War II, eugenics was all the rage at American universities, all of which taught eugenics courses; but eugenics fell out of favor after the Nazis used eugenics to justify their horrific exterminations.
• For years before the Housing Bubble burst at about 2006, the financial experts assured us it was no problem, and the most respected Wall Street experts assured us it would not cause much trouble; but the Housing Bubble led to the Great Recession of 2008, with millions losing their homes, and the stock market plunging.
• For decades in the 20^th century, psychiatry was dominated by the strange ideas of Sigmund Freud, which included the idea that much of mental illness was caused by sexual conflicts in childhood; but Freud's ideas are now generally dismissed by psychologists, who regard them as largely nonsensical and unscientific.
• The military experts and foreign policy experts in high positions mostly supported the idea in 2003 that it was good idea to invade Iraq to get rid of its “weapons of mass destruction”; but no such weapons were found, and the resulting futile war was a disaster which plunged Iraq into many years of chaos, cost America more than 2 trillion dollars, and resulted in perhaps a million Iraqi deaths.
• Experts at the US government signed off on a medicine called Vioxx, which was then prescribed by countless doctors, until it was found that it had caused many thousands of unnecessary deaths by creating heart problems.
• Countless doctors wrote prescriptions for opioid medications so casually and frequently that “from 2000 to 2015 more than half a million people died from drug overdoses” according to the CDC; and the resulting opioid addiction and overdose problem is currently one of the worst problems facing the US.

 

From all of these examples we can make the general conclusion that expert opinion is very often wrong, and not just wrong in some small way, but wrong in a very big way.

Is there some general reason why experts often get things wrong? There seems to be such a reason. It is the fact that experts often are trained in ideological enclaves. An expert typically becomes an expert by volunteering for some particular graduate or specialized training program at a university or in the military. These graduate programs are often ideological enclaves, places where there predominates some particular ideology not embraced by most people. The ideology that predominates at neuroscience departments of universities is a materialist ideology based on dogmas such as the dogma that minds are made by brains.

The fact that the graduates of such programs are volunteers creates the opportunity for sociological selection effects. Let's imagine an extreme example. Let's imagine there arises some new discipline called tricostics. It might be the opinion of 90% of those who have read about tricostics that tricostics is pure nonsense. But tricostics might be “all the rage” at some Graduate Program in Tricostics Studies at a particular university, or some Pentagon training program specialized in tricostics. The people who sign up for such a program might almost all be from the tiny fraction of the population that believes in tricostics. At this particular program there might then be tremendous sociological pressure for students to embrace tricostics. So 90% of the graduates of this tricostics program might be believers in tricostics, even though a randomly selected jury from the general population would probably conclude tricostics is worthless nonsense.

An expert existing in some ideological enclave may get be filled with dogmatic overconfidence about some opinion that is popular within his little ideological enclave. He may think something along the lines of: “No doubt it is true, because almost all my peers and teachers agree that it is true.” But the idea may seem senseless to someone who has not been conditioned inside this ideological enclave, this sheltered thought bubble.

A good rule is: decide based on the facts, and not merely because there is some consensus of experts.

Departments of neuroscience in our universities are ideological enclaves, as are departments of evolutionary biology. Anyone signing up for a PhD program in neuroscience is someone who has signed up to be conditioned in the dogmas of an ideological enclave, as is anyone who signs up for a PhD program in evolutionary biology, as is anyone who signs up for a 2-year minister education program or a priesthood training program. Like a rubber stamp stamping out the same ink pattern, these ideological enclaves tend to create people who all mouth the same dogmas. We should not be particularly impressed by a uniformity or near-uniformity of opinion coming out of such ideological enclaves.

The fact that 99% of the graduates of fundamentalist theology schools believe in fundamentalist theology is not a very powerful argument for fundamentalist theology. The fact that 99% of the graduates of Catholic seminary schools believe in Catholic theology is not a very powerful argument for Catholic theology. And the fact that 90% of the graduates of neuroscience PhD programs may adhere to the prevailing dogmas of neuroscientists is not a very powerful argument that such dogmas are correct. All such things can be explained as examples of the power of groupthink and social conformity.

Besides these sociological factors, it is easy to think of psychological and financial factors why experts may tend to come to wrong conclusions in matters of neuroscience and evolutionary biology.

Exercise 1: Imagine you have just spent five long hard years and $100,000 in cash to get a PhD in neuroscience. Now you can believe one of two things:

1. The mind is a great mystery, and you have learned a lot about the brain, but very little as to why humans actually have mind, consciousness or memory.
2. You are a great knowledge master on the topics of the mind and the brain, and you know the answers to all the main questions involving where minds come from and how memory works.

Which of these two opinions will you tend to favor after having spent five long years and $100,000 of your money to get a PhD in neuroscience? Of course, there are psychological reasons why you will tend to favor the second opinion, which bolsters your prestige and self-esteem. Similarly, a person who spends five years getting a PhD in evolutionary biology (spending $100,000 on graduate school) will have a very strong tendency to think that he has become a great knowledge master who can now explain how biological innovations arose and how species appeared, an opinion that bolsters his own self-esteem and prestige.

In both of these cases a person who has no vested interest may tend to come to a vastly different conclusion than the person who has a vested interest in the matter. When we also consider that the newly minted neuroscience PhD or evolutionary biologist PhD has a vast financial incentive to parrot the party line (which will make him more likely to get appointed as a tenured professor and more likely to get his papers published), it is rather easy to understand the persistence of unfounded but popular dogmas in these fields.

Below are some cases of social groups in which all members were conditioned to believe certain dogmas, with various forms of sanctions for any deviation from the group orthodoxy.

Social Group	Dogma Mandated by Social Group
Ancient Roman senators	The belief that Rome is destined to rule the world, and that local rebellions must be quickly crushed.
Medieval clergymen	The belief that the Church is the supreme holder of truth, and that heretics must be destroyed.
Southern US slaveholders, circa 1830	The belief that people with dark skin are fit only to serve as slaves.
German officials, World War II	The belief that Germans are destined to rule as the master race.
Soviet Union officials, circa 1950	The belief that history is essentially a class struggle that is reaching its climax in the creation of communist worker's paradises such as the Soviet Union.
American government and military officials, circa 1965	The belief that much of Vietnam must be thoroughly bombed to prevent Communist expansion.
Modern biology professors	The belief that biological innovations have  appeared merely because of random mutations and natural selection, and that the brain is the sole source of the human mind and self.

In each of these groups there is or was relentless peer pressure to conform to the doctrine in the second column.  A person outside the group may regard such a doctrine as absurd, but to the group member bound by the iron chains of social conformity, such a doctrine may have been deemed as unquestionable wisdom.

People will think and do things merely because it is customary to think and do such things. Consider male New York City office workers in the 1950's. Almost every one of them went to work wearing a tie. But wearing a tie is a silly custom. A man's neck will be more comfortable if he doesn't wear a tie. So why did office workers in the 1950's all wear ties? It was the power of social conformity effects. No one wanted to be the "oddball" who did not wear a tie in his office.  Belief customs and dress customs may persist for decades or centuries mainly because of the power of peer pressure and social conformity effects.  A conformist social group (whether it be a tribe of academics or a high school cafeteria table) compels us to dress or speak in some way, and we conform, wanting above all to fit in to whatever little social group we are part of.