Social life needs predictable people who conform to expectations. There are common expectations which apply to every person in the group, and personal expectations based on one’s perceived role and past behavior.
Deviating from common expectations costs idiosyncrasy credits. Dressing differently, eating strange diets, watching documentaries that no one else does and not watching the show everyone talks about – these all exhaust a limited budget of nonconformity. The budget accrues to people who conform or are popular; the two often go hand in hand.
As Homer Simpson noted: “Marge, I can’t wear a pink shirt to work, everybody wears white shirts. I’m not popular enough to be different.”
When someone exceeds their idiosyncrasy budget, their opinions will get dismissed on grounds of absurdity bias and the horn effect. If you want to tell your millennial friends about crazy ideas like unfriendly AI or Ribbonfarm, make sure you are otherwise appropriate.
Personal expectations include playing out roles and simply being the same person over time. Even changes of mind that don’t violate group norms, like hating a movie that you liked last year, can be grating. If you’re not changing in ways that are fun for your friends, you’re just making yourself hard to model and get along with.
Imagine a conversation with just a few people. When deciding whether to tell a joke, you have to consider your friends’ likely reactions to the joke. But you also have to consider their reaction to everyone else’s reaction, and what it implies about everyone’s relationships and status, and so on down many layers of metacognition. If you can’t rely on heuristics of shared group expectations and consistency over time, the computational effort is overwhelming. You’re likelier than not to go look for a more predictable group of friends to joke with.
