Agnes Callard on Conformism and Conversation
Agnes Callard, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, gave a talk on Wednesday, March 19, on the topic of conformism. She has been on a book tour for Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life (Norton, 2025), but decided to come to Reed to take a break and deliver a dramatic exploration of her most recent area of interest.
The talk began with a classical definition of conformism. Callard presented theatrical readings of Emmanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, highlighting how they all take a view of conformism which is all about individualism. All of these authors took issue with individuals who allow other people’s thoughts to dictate their own. “Insist on yourself; never imitate,” as Emerson said. Essentially, in the classical approach, conformism is a problem of being over-influenced by others.
Throughout the talk, Callard offered a differing perspective on the topic of conformism. She led her audience through some of the process of discovery of her new definition. She began by noting that conformism is imitation, compliance, assimilation, submission to authority, but acting in these ways does not inherently make you a conformist. Clearly, conformism is not the same as cooperation, so what differentiates good, productive compliance, from morally fraught compliance? Callard briefly took on the role of the pessimistic skeptic to state that “Conformism is what we call cooperation when we dislike it.”
But surely not all hope is lost for pinning down a definition. Perhaps conformism is when an individual complies with morally wrong dictates? Perhaps, “conformism is objectively bad compliance,” or “effective compliance to a malicious sentiment.” The only problem with this definition is that, in order for this to be our solution, we’d need to bring in an exterior, “objective” definition of good and bad. Then, conformism becomes bad when the cooperation is not utilitarian, or equitable, or honest, or whatever other moral framework one might wish to bring to the table. However, this approach doesn’t exactly explain what makes our bad conformism distinctively bad. Our “bad compliance” is bad for the same reason as everything else, so we haven’t really learned anything about conformism.
Callard said that we should turn away from classical attempts to define conformism, because they work on an inherently individualistic basis. Basically, a conformist is anyone who “is insufficiently self-attuned.” This individualistic approach suggests that all you need to do is get rid of your dependence on others. But, Callard suggests “that [this form of conformism is] just the wrong kind of dependence.”
Callard finally threw out a working definition: “A conformist behaves as others would expect them to behave, even when it’s not at their advantage to do so.” The conformist avoids a disruption of the status quo, even when such a disruption would be beneficial. Sometimes it’s fun—even necessary—to break the rules, but even if that is the case, the conformist still doesn’t. Thus, Callard entered into the second arena of the talk: conversation.
We follow countless rules in our conversations. Every day of our lives, we subconsciously follow norms for how we interact with each other. By following these rules, are we conformists? In one sense, yes. Every time we intentionally avoid profound discussion because it’s simply not the norm, we are conformists. Callard put it simply, “In the conformist conversation, we each have the conversation we expect the other to have.”
She describes this conformist conversation as “relationship upkeep conversation.” You talk about the weather, you take someone's side if they explain how something bad happened to them, and, above all, you abstain from the discussion of taboo topics for fear that it might force a reconciliation. “It’s commonplace,” Callard acknowledged. It’s everywhere, but she “[wants] you to see it now in a new light.”
In this “relationship upkeep conversation,” both parties are stuck in a bad equilibrium, where we’re not digging deeper towards a better conversation that we could be having because we’re stuck conforming to expectations of what a conversation should be, and we’re afraid that digging deeper might lead to an even worse place than we currently are. Callard defines this conformism as “[m]issing out on the goods proper to social interaction because we underestimate the potential of those interactions.”
Callard’s definition of conformism extends beyond just conversation. We settle for clothing that is not our ideal because we’re afraid to disrupt the status quo. Callard claims that what makes the choice of normative clothing conformist is if we’re intentionally limiting ourselves by matching others. An educational system where a student attends college just because “that’s what people do,” for mere conformism, is not ideal. We conform when we fail to see the potential of disrupting a system, and hence never attempt disruption.
Callard recommends that we speak out against this type of conformism; we should aim to put the better equilibrium in view. However, this is hard work. Conversation is an immensely complex method of interaction, and one worthy of study. A fair portion of the talk was dedicated to the philosophy of conversation, which felt like a brush against the massive iceberg that is all of the intricacies of human conversation (for those interested, Callard noted that Harvey Sacks’ Lectures on Conversation is hugely informative on the subject).
Conversation is “the primordial site of sociality,” as psychologist Gus Cooney said. Callard detailed how this truly is the case, as empirical evidence demonstrates that participants in conversations predict each other’s behavior, and modify their own, on a split second timeframe, even regulating their own breathing to be more in sync.
The example which Callard dove into—and which she has coined—is known as “negative coordination.” This is the way in which conversations coordinate on what they’re not going to coordinate, or rather, where participants have to negotiate what is acceptable to discuss. If you’re playing chess, in Callard’s example, then you don’t have to negatively coordinate; the bounds of the game are clearly stated and there’s no worry that your civil chess game may morph into a tennis match. However, in conversation, the participants define where the conversation can go.
Callard framed conversation in terms of an expansion in two dimensions. A conversation has breadth (that is, the range of topics discussed) and depth (the profundity of conclusions reached on a topic). “Negative coordination inhibits breadth and depth” by removing things we can talk about and the ways we can talk about them. Yet, conversation demands negative coordination. A conversation needs its participants to be on the same page, discussing the same subject, or else it’s just two monologues. In order to have a worthwhile conversation, one must probe the participants' negative coordination, to push the limits of where the conversation can go. The real challenge of conversation is “the challenge of getting our own conformism into view.” It’s reasonable that interpersonal conversation should be one of the pivotal areas of investigation when analyzing conformity, given Callard’s ultimate claim that “conversation is the home of conformism.”