Neurotypica

Your brain learns chunks by observing what co-occurs: which ideas get mentioned together, which behaviours follow which situations, which beliefs cluster in the people around you. Communities coordinate these co-occurrences through shared practices. When everyone in your group treats "distrust institutions" and "value self-sufficiency" as naturally linked, your brain learns that association automatically---not because you reasoned it through, but because those ideas travel together in your social environment.

So what can you do? Recognise that beliefs stack socially, not logically. If you're trying to change someone's mind about one belief in a cluster, challenging it in isolation often fails because the other beliefs in the cluster activate in defence. Instead, work at the level of practice: change the coordinated activities, shift which community someone is exposed to, or introduce new coordinated pairings that chunk the ideas differently. You're not arguing against the belief; you're changing the social environment that made it natural.

In social contexts, predicting "I'll do what the group does" minimises surprise and social cost. Your brain builds a model of what's normal, expected, and valued in each group, and acting to confirm that prediction is usually the lowest-error path. This is why dissent feels uncomfortable---it generates prediction errors not just in your brain but in the social feedback you get. The group expected you to agree, you didn't, and now there's mismatch.

So what can you do? If you want to maintain independent thinking in a group, you have to tolerate the prediction errors that come with dissent. Expect discomfort---that's the system signalling mismatch between your action and the group model. You can reduce the cost by building relationships where dissent is explicitly valued, so the group model includes "sometimes we disagree" as a normal pattern. Or you can separate social belonging from intellectual agreement, so prediction errors in one domain don't threaten the other.

Groups naturally bias towards conformity because it speeds coordination and reduces conflict. Everyone using the same chunks, the same language, the same framings makes communication efficient and action aligned. But that bias suppresses alternatives---the group stops sampling different approaches, and bad ideas can entrench simply because they're shared. Diversity is noise: it slows things down, creates friction, but it's also what allows the group to explore and correct.

So what can you do? Design for the right balance. When you need coordination and fast execution, bias is productive---tighten norms, reinforce shared practices, align the team. When you need innovation or course correction, introduce noise deliberately: invite dissent, bring in outside perspectives, create space for alternative framings. Don't mistake conformity for correctness, and don't mistake diversity for chaos. Both are tools; use them strategically depending on whether you need exploitation or exploration.