Human beings are pack animals. All the studio apartments in Australia won't change the large part of our brain devoted to functioning as social beings. From an evolutionary point of view, it's served us well. It continues to define us in ways we're probably not aware of.
The American journalist Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer for exploring this very dynamic in Join the Club. She points to a study from the 1950s that shows just how powerful our desire to belong to the pack is.
Psychologist Solomon Asch invited a group of people — one off the street and the rest secret participants briefed by Asch — into a room. All were given charts with lines and asked questions about the length of the lines. The answer had to be said aloud and the secret participants always went first. The questions were obvious, but after hearing the secret participants give the wrong answer, the lone subject usually joined their opinion.
The takeout: 'In the face of strong public pressure to conform, most people conform.'
Monday's release of a review into military abuse reminds us how dangerous this lean to conformity can be. The Commonwealth Government's apology and suite of provisions for victims follows law firm DLA Piper's review into sexual and other forms of abuse by the military, announced in April 2011 after the Skype sex scandal. The firm received allegations of abuse from some 847 people, dating back to the 1950s.
The report looks at everything from the 'bastardisation' of new recruits, which 'seems to have been tacitly accepted as a part of ADF life', to the absence of safeguards protecting young people from each other and of adequate reporting and accountability structures.
Damningly, it states 'It is possible male cadets who raped female cadets at ADFA in the late 1990s, and other cadets who witnessed such rape and did not intervene, may now be in middle to senior management positions'.
There appears to be a similar mentality at play here, to that which alowed a French woman to suffer a tirade of racist and misogynistic abuse on a bus in Melbourne while, in the words of one Fairfax op-ed, the majority of passengers 'were silent and impassive, probably wishing they were elsewhere'.
Where was the dissent, in the face of such clear injustice?
Rosenberg might have one answer. She quotes Arizona State University psychology professor Robert Cialdini about the importance of community norms when facing something new.