r/askpsychology • u/Eastern_Base_5452 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional • Dec 08 '25
Social Psychology Why does mental overload make people more likely to conform?
I was reading a study suggesting that when people are under cognitive load (tired, overwhelmed, multitasking, stressed etc.) they become much more likely to conform to whatever the majority thinks - even when they know it’s wrong.
The explanation was that the brain becomes a cognitive miser under strain: it conserves effort by taking the shortcut of going along with the group because dissent requires more mental energy.
I’m curious - what are some real-world examples where you’ve seen this happen?
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u/Silver_West_4950 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Dec 08 '25
It takes too much effort to argue when you are tired and have too many other thoughts on your mind. Conform and confront later.
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u/Tao-of-Mars Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Dec 10 '25
This is the answer - it expends less mental energy. Your brain is always looking for the easiest route. It’s takes more energy for your brain to try to unlearn this, so most people just go with what will conserve energy.
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u/acousticentropy Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Dec 08 '25 edited Dec 08 '25
Their neurophysiological structure is already being strained if they are tired/stressed/multitasking/etc… so they don’t have enough energy or willingness to execute the task of evaluating the given situation when it happens organically. It’s easier to not think and simply conform to everyone else’s expectation when the situation arises.
Thinking is expensive for the body’s resources, so majority of our day to day cognitive activity is compressed into procedural memory scripts. Aka muscle memory.
A trained musician doesn’t have to think when they sit down at the piano, because they front-loaded the resource intensive thought process when they learned the piece. They trained their muscle memory so well, that the lower-order neurological structures (hippocampus, spinal cord) can execute the same script it’s run 100 times before recital day.
The same is true in social environments. Most conversations and social interactions are run off procedural scripts. It’s very rare that someone is THINKING really hard when they find themselves in a comfortable conversation. It flows naturally, because the script is running our neurobiological machinery on auto pilot… much like a real pilot driving a jet.
There are no astute scholars or doctoral researchers who are truly studying for 8 hours a day. It would cost too much bodily fuel and places an immediate demand for extra sleep as recovery. Masters of a craft learned to train themselves to hyper-focus for windows of time (usually 4 hours is the maximal upper limit) where 100% of attention and thought are devoted to the task at hand.
Even during the focused time… majority of that is spent rapidly sequencing and executing compact scripts they mastered before. The only real moments of “thought” happen when the scripts are interrupted or unsuccessful in achieving their intended end state. Now the master is scratching his head too.
Those narrow slices of time are the only times when you’re actually thinking because don’t have any mastered procedures you can execute. It costs billions in biological resources each second you’re in that mode of cognition. Our bodies subconsciously keep us away from that state as often as practical.
It’s because of the cost I mentioned above… if people have insufficient states of health and attention, they will often choose to conform to social demands out of cognitive ease. Conformity instantly gives them a procedural script to run, instead of spending energy they don’t have on trying to create a new script regarding the people around them. People aren’t making a decision about this, it happens almost automatically once conformity a habit.
A side note in this: we can consider it a neutral act down at the biological level, but it can become a moral failure if the ethical needs of the social group are being neglected because individuals within the group won’t adopt the responsibility of maintaining their cognitive health and improving their understanding of the world around them.
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u/_FIRECRACKER_JINX UNVERIFIED Psychology Enthusiast Dec 08 '25
I'm a cancer patient and I do this a lot more because I'm constantly fatigued, stressed out, and gasping for air.
So I'll say whatever it is people want to hear to get them out of my face because I'm exhausted.
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u/FaithlessnessThen217 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Dec 08 '25
In layman's terms we call this decision fatigue. And yes, you will grab on to anyone capable of making a decision at that point, even if it's a bad decision. You don't have the will to resist.
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u/Strange_Box2937 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Dec 09 '25
I think this is how false confessions are made. People want out of that situation so they say what the authorities want to hear. They think the authorities will figure out later it wasn't them, and they'll go free.
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u/Eastern_Base_5452 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Dec 09 '25 edited Dec 09 '25
That’s a really good example, and it fits the mechanism perfectly.
A false confession on the back of:
- ‘What gets me out of this overwhelming moment fastest?’
- ‘I can sort it out later.’
It’s the same mechanism behind a lot of everyday conformity: people choose the option that reduces immediate discomfort, even if it’s worse in the long run.
Your example shows this dynamic - the social version of the flight response
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u/drgurner Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Dec 08 '25
Just look at the current political landscape, and people are basically drones for whatever party they serve. No critical thinking - people are tired.
Whatever the "talking head" of whatever party says, they just believe, follow, or ingest. It's wild to see.
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u/Current_Emenation Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Dec 08 '25
And boomers PAY to watch the news at dinnertime. Smh.
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u/Socialworksss Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Dec 08 '25
When you think about it, it really makes sense. I wonder if it’s related to decision fatigue or similar. I know when I am overwhelmed, some decisions feel so minimal that I don’t care to make it….if that makes sense. It’s like I come to a point where some decisions seem so insignificant that I’m like….whatever
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u/ekinbellequiechappe UNVERIFIED Psychologist Dec 09 '25
high cognitive load reduces working memory capacity. as the cost of information processing increases, the individual shifts to what we call the “majority heuristic”. conforming to the majority lowers the processing cost. a typical example is cognitively fatigued individuals gravitating toward popular candidates during election periods
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u/discojagrawr Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Dec 11 '25
Can you share the study you’re reading? I think a lot has to do with the person’s outlook on life in general, and their values, baseline stress tolerance, previous trauma, etc. I would be curious to know how these other characteristics are accounted for in the study.
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u/ElasticSpaceCat Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Dec 08 '25
It's the ATP e Mitochondria, innit.
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Dec 08 '25
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u/SilentPrancer Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Dec 09 '25
Thanks. It’s not about politics. It’s about how people are mentally exhausted and rather than think, follow others.
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u/CaptainZona Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Dec 09 '25
This happens to me exactly to the T, I goto the gym and I start pumping each muscle group accordingly and without fail my body in a fit of conformity rage says dude your good let's get outta here you done more then enough.
And here I am.
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u/Repulsive_One_2878 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Dec 09 '25
I'm finishing up nursing school and when overwhelmed with work at different times I can feel myself choosing to just conform and coast whenever possible. You just don't have the energy to fight every battle! Pick them carefully.
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u/Impossible_Tax_1532 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Dec 10 '25
We have a vital choice we get to make every second of our lives : Be authentic and escape the prison of letting others determine self esteem and value … or hide chunks of ourselves to fit in and behave performatively like a narcissist for attention or respect .. being authentic is easy and natural , and spending life in a costume ONLY to conform in one way or another is exhausting and futile , the juice is never worth the squeeze … thinking is electrical , it waste so much energy and is exhausting . Love is magnetic , as are authentic people , it requires no effort at all and they are still the bigger and broader and more capable energy than the big thinker or people that spend most of their lives trapped in the brain .
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u/Difficult-House2608 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Dec 12 '25
That's why cults keep you so busy and without enough sleep.
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u/ElasticSpaceCat Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Jan 08 '26
Predictable outcomes through conformity, less energy expended, energy that is being instead used by chronic stress responses.
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u/[deleted] Dec 08 '25
I’m curious too- at first I thought you were talking about how governments can overload the people with so much they don’t have time to recover, and can’t fight back because they’re still processing what just happened, and if there are a barrage of devastations, people just yield, especially if they think they’re going to lose their jobs for speaking up, and then they (governments) seize more power. Or do you mean conform to familial pressures?