Sometimes Lemmings Give You Lemons.
On the tendency toward conformity.
The recent drama surrounding how some school boards around Virginia are opposing the new Governor’s executive order giving parents authority to decide whether their kids wear masks at school has given me an opportunity to examine the workings of our local school board (in Alexandria, Virginia) more closely. Really, it’s required all parents to do that, since the issue directly pits their authority against that of local school boards in unique ways. The first part of this piece might be only of local interest, but the second part discusses research on the general human tendency to conform, regardless of the evidence.
School Board of Conformity
Our local school board, like many others, is composed entirely of members of one political party (in this case, Democrats), leaving no one on the board to express any contrary views, information, or data. Following up on my piece Masking the Science on Masks, our local school board unanimously passed a “motion” that states as follows (with my numbering the propositions in brackets for ease of discussion later):
the School Board reaffirms its commitment to ensuring the safe and efficient operation of the schools and the provision of in-person instruction by [1] employing the COVID-19 mitigation measures recommended by the federal Centers for Disease Control, including specifically masking of students, staff and visitors [2] as approved by the Board on August 3, 2021, and [3] in accordance with Regulation GBE-R/JHCC-R adopted by the Board on December 16, 2021 and [4] other policies and regulations, and [5] authorize the actions recommended by the Board Attorney, as presented in closed session, including the participation in legal action if and as needed.
Let’s take these claims in turn.
[1] The board claims to be reaffirming a policy of “employing the COVID-19 mitigation measures recommended by the federal Centers for Disease Control.” But the board doesn’t follow all CDC guidance. For example, the school system doesn’t require “the most protective mask” recommended by the CDC. Emails have even gone out from the local school stating “classroom teachers have received KN95 student masks for each child … This is an option for those students who choose to wear it—it is not required and we will not force them to wear the KN95 mask.”
[2] The motion adopted by the board on August 3, 2021, doesn’t seem to apply past “the fall 2021 semester.”
[3] Regulation GBE-R/JHCC-R, adopted by the Board on December 16, 2021, defines “face coverings/masks,” for purposes of its masking requirement as: “Face covering/mask: an item normally made of cloth or various other materials (with elastic bands or cloth ties) that is secured over the wearer’s nose and mouth to contain or reduce the spread of potentially infectious respiratory secretions at the source (i.e., the person’s nose and mouth). Face coverings may not be neck gaiters nor have exhalation valves or vents, which allow virus particles to escape.” Again, cloth masks are allowed, in contradiction of the CDC’s guidance.
[4] The school board passed a resolution on April 24, 2020, which remains in place, that states “the Alexandria City School Board suspends such policies or provisions within such policies which reflect legal and/or regulatory requirements that have been waived by the governmental authority which enacted those requirements.” As I’ve mentioned previously, the former Governor signed executive order 79, which states “All students, teachers, staff, and visitors must wear a mask over their nose and mouth while on school property.” The current Governor waived those school mask requirements by executive order, leaving such policy to parents’ discretion. That would seem to require the Alexandria City School Board to suspend the mask policy of executive order 79, which has now been waived by executive order 2, which was issued by “the same governmental authority” (namely, the Governor’s Office) that issued executive order 79.
[5] What are the “actions recommended by the Board Attorney, as presented in closed session”? Putting litigation strategy aside, whatever legal advice the school board is relying on to justify their policies should be made public, so it can be independently evaluated by others.
After the board approved the motion, the school superintendent sent out a message adding that “The Virginia Constitution grants responsibility and authority to local school boards to operate and supervise schools in their division,” and the schools have to “abide by the Virginia General Assembly adopted Senate Bill 1303.”
Interestingly, the school board’s “motion” mentions neither of these authorities. Perhaps that’s because the referenced provision of the Virginia Constitution — which states “The supervision of schools in each school division shall be vested in a school board, to be composed of members selected in the manner, for the term, possessing the qualifications, and to the number provided by law” — doesn’t answer the question as to whether school boards control health and safety regulations (or, for that matter, crimes committed by students), as opposed to other state agencies. And on January 21, 2022, the Virginia Department of Education, in conjunction with the Virginia Department of Health, issued guidance stating “There is no medical reason for a vaccinated and/or masked teacher to treat an otherwise healthy unmasked student any differently than a healthy masked student.” And the Virginia Constitution states in Article V that “The chief executive power of the Commonwealth shall be vested in a Governor,” and that “The Governor shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
Which gets us to the Virginia law passed by the General Assembly (Senate Bill 1303), that I analyzed in more detail here, which states in part “each school board shall … provide such in-person instruction in a manner in which it adheres, to the maximum extent practicable, to any currently applicable mitigation strategies for early childhood care and education programs and elementary and secondary schools to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 that have been provided by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” Again, the school board itself clearly doesn’t read that provision to require schools to follow “CDC guidelines” because the board only requires schools to follow some of those guidelines, and not others.
The Human Tendency to Conform
As I’ve written previously, there’s lots of evidence that mask policies at schools, as an independent mitigation measure, are ineffective. Yet the school board passed their motion opposing parents’ role in masking policy unanimously, and apparently without any debate regarding the contradictions mentioned above. The political conformity exhibited by the board brought to mind Robert Sapolsky’s book “Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst," in which he writes:
Conformity can be great—it’s helpful if everyone in a culture agrees on whether shaking your head up and down means yes or no. Conforming is necessary for the benefits of the wisdom of the crowd … But obviously conformity can be horrendous—joining in on bullying, oppressing, shunning, expelling, killing, just because everyone else is on board.
He writes of the human tendency to feel pressured to go along with others, even when someone might personally disagree:
The depths of human conformity and obedience are shown by the speed with which they occur—it takes less than 200 milliseconds for your brain to register that the group has picked a different answer from yours, and less than 380 milliseconds for a profile of activation that predicts changing your opinion. Our brains are biased to get along by going along in less than a second … In numerous studies a subject in a group answers some question, finds out after that—oh no!—everyone else disagrees, and can then change their answer. No surprise, the discovery that you are out of step activates the amygdala and insular cortex; the more activation, the greater your likelihood of changing your mind, and the more persistent the change … When you get the news that everyone else disagrees with you, there is also activation of the (emotional) vmPFC, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the nucleus accumbens. This is a network mobilized during reinforcement learning, where you learn to modify your behavior when there is a mismatch between what you expected to happen and what actually did … The greater the activation of this circuit, the greater the likelihood of changing answers to conform.
The book makes another point about the tendency of people who view their own motivations as pure to paper over inconsistencies in their own reasoning, and to judge others more harshly. Sapolsky writes:
We use different brain circuits when contemplating our own moral failings (heavy activation of the vmPFC) versus those of others (more of the insula and dlPFC). And we consistently make different judgments, being more likely to exempt ourselves than others from moral condemnation. Why? Part of it is simply self-serving; sometimes a hypocrite bleeds because you’ve scratched a hypocrite. The difference may also reflect different emotions being involved when we analyze our own actions versus those of others … Going easy on ourselves also reflects a key cognitive fact: we judge ourselves by our internal motives and everyone else by their external actions. And thus, in considering our own misdeeds, we have more access to mitigating, situational information. This is straight out of Us/Them—when Thems do something wrong, it’s because they’re simply rotten; when Us-es do it, it’s because of an extenuating circumstance, and “Me” is the most focal Us there is, coming with the most insight into internal state.
When government officials enact public policy with a sense of personal motivational purity, they’re much less likely to support policies that allow pluralism, that is, a system in which two or more sources of authority can coexist. Hence the particular difficulty with accepting a policy, such as that articulated in Governor Youngkin’s executive order 2, which states “In light of the variety of circumstances confronted by students in the Commonwealth, parents should have the ability to decide whether their child should wear masks for the duration of the school day.”
There are lots of ways to try to potentially reduce the spread of COVID: distancing, better ventilation, and masks, among other things. If you look closely at the science, it turns out that when you try to see if the mask part alone makes any difference in reducing the spread of COVID, it doesn’t seem to. Many people see that in America, and around the world. So millions of primary school students in America, and millions more in Europe and elsewhere, haven’t had to wear masks for a long time, if at all, and still don’t have to wear masks. The policy of the newly-elected Governor of Virginia is that parents should be able to opt their kids out of masks in school. But while the school board passed a resolution two years ago saying they will go along with the Governor when the Governor waives a regulation relating to the COVID pandemic, that was when the Governor was affiliated with a political party other than their own and the school board is ignoring their own policy now that the Governor is affiliated with a different political party. If you watch the part of the school board meeting where the members vote on the “motion” on masks (scroll down to agenda item 25, and click the video symbol there), you’ll see there was no discussion at all regarding the science of masks as an independent way of reducing the spread of COVID, no discussion of their prior resolution saying they’ll follow the Governor’s COVID-related waivers, or anything else.
That’s politics. Now, my advice to kids is: don’t worry about the politics, just focus on learning. But learn from this episode as well.