The false consensus effect is the observation that people tend to overestimate the number of people who share their views. In modern environments we also see growing evidence of greater polarization. For example, according to the Pew Research Center over the past five decades, congressional US Democrat and Republican ideologies have increasingly diverged, with an ever shrinking middle ground. This is appears to also be reflected among US citizens, with a "disappearing center" hastened by growing “anarchist” and “anti-establishment” ideologies. Many have speculated that this polarization is a global phenomenon. The question we pose here is how beliefs and network structure might interact to facilitate both false consensus effects and rising polarization.

In the 1980s and 90s in psychology, many cross-cultural comparisons were made concerning individualism and collectivism with questionnaires and experiments. The largest number of them compared “collectivistic” Japanese with “individualistic” Americans. This chapter reviewed 48 such empirical comparisons and found that Japanese were no different from Americans in the degree of collectivism. Both questionnaire studies and experimental studies showed essentially the same pattern of results. Many researchers who believed in “Japanese collectivism” suspected flaws in those empirical studies. However, none of the suspected flaws was consistent with empirical evidence. For example, although it was suspected that “Japanese collectivism” was not supported because college students provided data as participants, the studies with non-student adults did not support this common view either. It is thus unquestionable that as a whole the empirical studies disproved the reality of “Japanese collectivism.”

Bayle invites us to reflect on the psychological effects of conformity on the dissenter himself, forced to violate his conscience, as well as the counter-intuitive implications of this infringement. Bayle suggests that infringements on conscience are experienced as deep violations by the dissenter, arguably just as unsettling as more violent forms of discipline and coercion. The experience of conforming to the state religion does not merely corrode mutual understanding among citizens but asks individuals to endure the taxing experience of suppressing and violating their consciences. Hypocritical conformity is not merely a trivial demand with little consequence for their integrity, as advocates of religious persecution insist, but a deeply felt violation that reverberates even long after the act of conformity is finished. Even more discerningly, Bayle recognizes that hypocritical conformity exacerbates conscientious fervor. Hypocritical conformity does not merely fail to inspire genuine conversion; it also radicalizes dissenters and urges them to be even more committed to their conscience. In an attempt to transform dissenters through hypocritical conformity, the state risks emboldening dissenters even further and inciting backlash against the state.

Some degree of hypocritical conformity is necessary, Spinoza argues, for a political society to function. Individuals cannot be free to do whatever they like, even if their conscience conflicts with the law. Yet Spinoza also recognizes that hypocritical conformity has its own pernicious repercussions, specifically the corrosion of civic trust. Spinoza’s conscientious speech warns that conformity corrodes the social trust that undergirds politics since individuals are not able to confidently assess the sincerity of their citizens. Spinoza aims to reconcile this tension by distinguishing speech from action. Dissenters must conform to the law, even if it conflicts with their conscience, but they should be able to express their conscience freely in speech.

This book argues that liberty of conscience remains a crucial freedom worth protecting, because safeguarding it prevents political, social, and psychological threats to freedom. Influential early modern theorists of toleration, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle, I show, defend liberty of conscience by stressing the unanticipated repercussions of conformity. By recovering the intellectual origins of liberty of conscience in early modern politics and situating influential theorists of toleration in overlooked historical debates on religious dissimulation and hypocritical conformity, I demonstrate that infringements on conscience risk impeding political engagement, eroding civic trust, and inciting religious fanaticism. While this is a book about freedom, it is also a book about threats to freedom, specifically conformity, hypocrisy, and persecution. It considers the social, psychological, and political harms done by political refusals to tolerate religious differences and allow individuals to practice their religion freely in accordance with the dictates of conscience. By returning to a historical context in which liberty of conscience was not granted to religious dissenters –but rather actively denied – this book foregrounds Bayle’s argument that coercing conscience exacerbates religious fervor and inflicts significant psychological harm on dissenters, thereby undermining the goal of cultivating social cohesion in politics. In controversies on the politics of conscience, I suggest that we acknowledge that refusals to tolerate claims of conscience – while perhaps well-grounded in democratic laws and norms – might exacerbate conscientious fervor and empower resentment against the state. This Baylean intuition does not necessarily tell us where to draw the limits of toleration – what should be tolerated and what goes beyond the pale – but it does tell us something about how to approach invocations of conscience and what to expect when we deem something intolerable.

The chapter examines the puritan claim that ‘moderate puritan’ was an oxymoron; that even self-professedly moderate or conforming puritans were in fact the carriers of an ideology subversive of all order in church and state. Indeed, the Laudians claimed that those puritans who at least pretended to conform were in fact more dangerous than out-and-out non-conformists, since the latter identified themselves and could thus be the more easily disciplined or removed. The others represented a fifth column, far harder to detect or discipline, and thus able to undermine the church from within. Within the episcopal hierarchy, the correlative of the moderate puritan was the so-called popular prelate, someone who cared far too much about his reputation amongst the godly and thought that the unity of the church could best be preserved by accommodating various sorts of puritans rather than by subjecting them to firm episcopal government. Such men represented a threat to the church almost as great as the puritans themselves. Here the figures of bishops like Williams of Lincoln or Hall of Exeter, and then Norwich, could be discerned between the lines of various Laudian diatribes.

This chapter looks at fellow-travelling Calvinist conformists, that is to say persons who had always espoused a Calvinist or reformed view of predestination, who, on certain issues and in certain modes, could sound like any moderate puritan, but who, on the issue of conformity, took a firmly anti-puritan line, and consequently on certain other issues could sound just like card-carrying Laudians. It does so through the analysis and comparison of the careers of two such men, Robert Sanderson and Humphrey Sydenham, whose views on the theology of grace, conformity and puritanism, and indeed on some of the signature values of Laudianism, are analysed and compared.

This chapter addresses the paradox, present both in the scholarly literature and in contemporary discourse, where Laudianism was often seen as both a revolutionary and a largely conservative or even reactionary movement; bent on root-and-branch reform and on the preservation of the moderate ‘Anglican’ status quo. This chapter shows that the Laudians presented themselves both as agents of change, pushing for the radical reformation of a church corrupted by decades of puritan corruption, and as conservatives, returning that church to its essential and original condition. What enabled both cases to be made was the extent of puritan influence over, and penetration of, the social and ideological fabric of the church. It was this that necessitated the reformation, which was designed to return the church to the condition it was in before the puritans ‘ruined’ it. That ideal state was variously located in either the Elizabethan or the early Edwardian reformations, and when such precedents were found insufficient to validate certain parts of the Laudian agenda, in the church of the apostles and the fathers. The result was once again a minimum and a maximum case for Laudian reformation, credit for which was variously attributed to Charles I, Archbishop Laud or the bishops more generally construed.

Societies are transformed by total wars, which mobilize entire populations, penetrate society as a whole, and involve both civilian and military populations as direct targets of aggression, as well as resources for inflicting harm and destroying the enemy. Total wars bring about enormous (forced) movement of populations, as well as changes in gender roles and social class relations. Because most men are directly involved on the front lines of the war effort, new opportunities are created for women to become active in areas from which they were previously excluded. Also, because of the enormous sacrifices made by the general population and the real possibility of national defeat at the hands of the enemy, the rich also become more ready to make some sacrifices. During total wars, the rich–poor divide becomes smaller, as the rich make larger contributions toward the war effort. However, as discussed in this chapter, evidence suggests that this increase in political plasticity is only temporary. The rich–poor divide has increased enormously since World War II.

Chapter 7 continues our examination of the Discussion stage (Stage 3) of the 4D Framework, aiming to better understand what people actually verbally express in political conversations. We use a series of vignette experiments and a lab experiment to examine the extent to which people express their true opinions to the group, or engage in other expressive behaviors like self-censorship, silencing, or conformity. We find lab experimental evidence of conformity in real conversations and our vignette experiments revealed that individuals were less likely to reveal their real opinions when they were in the political minority and when they were less knowledgeable. We also find that individuals who were less knowledgeable were more likely to have affiliation concerns that explained their expression behavior. Finally, we analyzed the transcripts from the conversations in the Psychophysiological Experience Study to examine variation in what and how individuals discussed politics. We found that weak partisans were most likely to "hedge" their language when revealing their opinions and political identities.

Chapter 4 examines US survivors‘ history after they came or returned to America. Particularly, the chapter highlights US survivors‘ memories of rebuilding their lives in a society that regarded Asians as both “perpetual foreigners” and ‘model minorities.’ Many Japanese American families included both those who had been in a Japanese American incarceration camp and those who had been attacked by the bomb. Many considered it best if their experiences were forgotten or left unspoken while they focused on their work and family lives. Some survivors served in the Korean War, while many others quietly grappled with the fear of radiation illness that might strike them anytime. Among Korean and Japanese military brides who came to America in these decades, too, their physicians’ lack of understanding about radiation effects became a concern. Social isolation, as well as physical ailments, became part of US survivors’ radiation illness. Throughout, the chapter focuses on how their layered silence about their experiences embodied an unspoken, yet powerful, norm for Asian America in the Cold War culture of conformity.

Herbert of Cherbury saw himself as a peacemaker. In De Veritate (1624) Herbert posits that religious conflict will disappear once people realize that they share core beliefs, monotheistic essentials he dubs the Common Notions in a nod to Stoicism. He proposes to refute skepticism by isolating criteria for truthful cognition: chiefly, conformity and consent. Why did Herbert, a champion of truth and enemy of skepticism, end up embracing skeptical impartiality and neutrality? The chapter argues that Herbert changes owing to his experiences during the Civil War and as a diplomat, but also following his work of the 1630s, composing his histories:Expedition to the Isle of Rhé and The Life and Reign of Henry VIII. Yet the seeds for this change are already present in his philosophy of mind, growing out of the appreciation for beauty implicit in his ideals of conformity and consent. The chapter shows that the corollaries of Herbert’s philosophy extend beyond political accommodation to neutrality and aesthetic detachment. Herbert’s work constitutes a valuable case-study of the connections forged between epistemology and politics in the turbulent second quarter of the seventeenth century.

This chapter examines the memory of those who conformed and compromised – so-called ‘Nicodemites’ – in the English Reformation. It takes as its starting point and central case study Matthew Parker (1504-75), the first Elizabethan archbishop of Canterbury, and his self-memorialisation in his memorial roll, a curious document which has often been described as autobiographical. The chapter considers the format, content and purpose of this unique manuscript, focusing particularly on the section dealing with Parker’s life during the reign of Mary I (1553-8) and the restoration of Roman Catholicism in England; a period in which Parker, unlike many other celebrated Protestants, was neither a martyr nor an exile, choosing instead the partial compromise of remaining in his newly hostile homeland. Both Parker himself and then his subsequent presented these years as either a period of inner spiritual constancy or as a time of suffering, a quasi-martyrdom. This, the chapter argues, reflects and illuminates a much larger process in which individual compromise was rewritten or forgotten in the creation of a larger, collective cultural memory of Protestant resistance and triumph.

While the 1790s are often thought of as the most political of years, this chapter uses a range of sources to question that assumption and to point to the extent that much talk about politics was seen as an essentially private matter.That position was one that loyalism and the government increasingly challenged in the 1790s, breaking down long-standing ways of understanding private conversation and political discussion and opening the way for the emergence of a new language and politics for both loyalism and reform at the beginning of the nineteenth century.Using newspaper archives it identifies the emergence of a new lexicon of politics, linked especially to the period 1820-1840, alongside the development of a new set of political practices.In the 1790s those interested in reform faced new and disturbing challenges to their practices and expectations and had to develop ways of responding to a world in which their alternatives seemed to become dramatically starker.