270 Self and the Phenomenon of Life
b2726 Self and the Phenomenon of Life: A Biologist Examines Life from Molecules to Humanity “9x6”become endeared with it, while second and third languages are never as
intimate and personal. Most people acquire their religious preference
from their parents during childhood. Westerners who are accustomed
to diatonic music may dislike the pentatonic melodies of the East, and
vice versa. In general, people who grow up in similar physical and social
environments develop closer ties with one another.^21 Furthermore, those
who have gone through the same hardship (at any age) such as war or
natural calamities often forge a lifelong comradeship.
12.6.5 Group pressure
Social conformity can be the outcome of peer pressure. The following
classical experiment, performed in the 1950s, is revealing. A group of
college students were asked to compare the length or height of a series
of lines (see Fig. 12.1). While doing so, each student was permitted to
observe the results of others. But unbeknownst to one of them (the test
subject), the results given by others were fake and intentionally incorrect
in a consistent way. The surprising outcome was that, in most instances,
the test subject preferred to blindly follow the judgment of others (the
majority), even if the judgment was initially considered wrong by him.^22
It thus appears safer for an individual to follow the group than to formu-
late his own opinion.
12.6.6 Collective consciousness
Members of a society usually share a common cognitive content — expe-
riences and memories in the form of oral and written histories, which
may include hard-to-verify happenings in the remote past such as leg-
ends, myths, and stories of cosmic and human origins. Values, ways of
life, aspirations, behavioral norms, existential meanings, and interpreta-
tions of death and afterlife (such as those contained in a religious belief)
are part of this spectrum. These cognitive contents permeate the entire
community and acquire a universal character among its members, are