The instinct to conform to the behavior of those around us, to the norms that others demonstrate, and to prize the abilities that most around us find second nature, is in the vast majority of cases extraordinarily adaptive and helpful, for both our individual survival and that of the human species. Our desire to conform is immense and yet crippling when it comes to creative output. In Asch’s experiments, there was a subset of those tested who reliably buckled under the pressure each and every time they were confronted with blatantly false reports of the relative lengths of the lines they were
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