If I wanted to, I could leave my house right now wearing nothing but pajamas and run down the street yelling blatant falsehoods like “Men in Black is the best alien movie!” at the top of my lungs. (The best alien movie is, of course, Independence Day.)
I have this freedom because of our blessed form of government known as liberal democracy. In this case, the word “liberal” is not referring to those namby-pamby latte-drinking snowflakes (Just kidding! I’m one!) but rather to a form of government with certain values and principles. Simply put, a liberal society is one in which everyone has the opportunity to pursue their version of the good life, provided it does not interfere with others’ pursuits of the same goal.
Political liberalism asserts the importance of many values we hold dear, including free speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Freedom of speech has been a topic of considerable controversy recently on college campuses, as student activists have engaged in increasingly vocal protests in support of the people of Gaza. Today, though, I want to focus on a different value: namely, self-expression.
Self-expression includes all the things we may want to do—all the ways we may want to be—that don’t involve speech. This includes what you wear, how you decorate your house, how you spend your time, how you style your hair, what art you create, and even whether or not you chose to do a silly walk on your way to work.
Self-expression is typically regarded as a human right. Consider, for example, the language of Article 19 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Similar language is found in the US Bill of Rights:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech…
The right to self-expression is a Very Good Thing: after all, humans are an incredibly diverse species, with preferences ranging from a peculiar obsession with the Roman Empire to a perplexing dislike of alien movies. Allowing people to express these preferences ensures everyone can live the way they want.
But I think this misses an important part of the story. That’s because we should recognize self-expression not just as a human right, but also as a responsibility.
Social Compression: The Pressure to Fit In
To see why, let’s take a brief detour into the land of psychology.
In the 1950’s, a psychologist named Solomon Ash made an important discovery. He was interested learning when and why people might conform to a group.
He recruited a number of subjects to take part in an experiment ostensibly to test their vision. Participants were seated at table with a number of other people and were asked to indicate which of three lines was the same length as a fourth. One by one, each person at the table responded with the answer “C.”
Unbeknownst to participants, every person seated at that table except for them was a confederate—that is, someone in cahoots with the experimenter.
The true participants were mystified. The answer was clearly “B.” Yet up to two thirds of the time, they changed their answers to match those given by the rest of the group. This experiment illustrates just how readily people succumb to peer pressure.
What causes people to cave so easily? In the seventy years since Asch’s original experiments, psychologists have sought answers to this question. One conclusion of this research is that life is just easier for those who conform. People who fit in are typically more respected, better liked, more likely to be included, and even more likely to be promoted than those who do not.
This appears to be a human universal. All around the world, there are bullies on playgrounds who tease kids for being different, friend groups who shun peers for holding unusual opinions, and trolls who dunk on people on social media for sharing unpopular views.
What this amounts to is a powerful set of social forces pushing everyone to be more average. Let’s call this force social compression. Social compression takes what might otherwise be a nice wide bell curve of human diversity, like this:
…and compresses it inward, like this:
Social Compression: Pros and Cons
How did social compression become such a powerful force? One reason, given to us by research in human anthropology, is that it gave us an evolutionary advantage. Humans evolved in small bands numbering a few dozen members. Many important activities, such as hunting large game and engaging in inter-group combat, depended on people working as a team. In such cases, people needed to set aside their own needs for the greater good.
More recently, as psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer argue in their book The Power of Us, social compression provides a number of other benefits like encouraging cooperation and sparking collective action.
Yet social compression also rears its head in situations in which it should not. Consider a classic study concerning drinking on college campuses. Researchers Deborah Prentice and Dale Miller asked students how uncomfortable they felt with campus drinking culture. Then they asked them to guess how uncomfortable they thought their peers were about the same issue.
They found that students significantly underestimated how uncomfortable they were with drinking on campus relative to their peers.
The researchers attributed this phenomenon to tendency known as pluralistic ignorance. While everyone was privately uncomfortable with the amount of drinking on campus, they thought they were alone in these views, and so hesitated to express them to others. This dynamic contributed to a vicious cycle: no one spoke up, leading to misunderstanding, discouraging people from speaking up, and so on.
This idea has implications for how we should think about social compression. It shows that people feel a pressure to conform to social standards when those standards don’t even exist.
Benefits of Self-Expression
Having seen how society pressures people to conform to real or illusory ideas of what is “normal,” I now want to explore the good things that can happen when people feel free to be themselves.
One of the most obvious beneficiaries of self-expression are people who have no choice but to be different. I’m thinking here of sexual minorities, who have historically been ostracized, punished or worse for failing to conform to what society counts as “normal.”
But one doesn’t have to be a sexual minority to benefit from self-expression. Indeed, research my collaborators and I have conducted suggests that self-expression benefits people of all stripes.
The research we conducted took place at Burning Man, a week-long gathering in the Black Rock Desert in central Nevada. At Burning Man, self-expression is the norm. Indeed, one of the “ten principles” that governs life at Burning Man is “radical self-expression.”
In this sense, then, Burning Man offers rich opportunities for experimentation in self-expression.
![Billion Bunny March 1 | Burning Man 2008 [062658] | Flickr Billion Bunny March 1 | Burning Man 2008 [062658] | Flickr](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fae81f7de-ea1c-4775-913d-27159defb403_1024x683.jpeg)
What our research found was that participants of Burning Man found this environment deeply freeing, and resulted in lasting psychological change.
For example, we asked participants to describe experiences they had while attending Burning Man. Among the most frequently-cited was the feeling that they could “be myself or explore a new part of myself.”
Moreover, many reported lasting changes in their sense of wellbeing, and a full two-thirds found the experience to be “transformative.”

These findings corroborate what many attendees of events like Burning Man have said for years: namely, that it represents more than just an opportunity to cavort in the desert. For many, it also offers a chance to meet a deep-seated need—to engage in new forms of self-expression.
Now, you may think these findings are only true for the weirdos who seek out these kinds of experiences in the first place. But our research shows that even people who didn’t necessarily expect or desire to be transformed by going to Burning Man nevertheless were changed by the experience. This was also the case for people who remained sober throughout the event. So these effects are more universal than you may think.
In sum, the intensely positive psychological effects of events like Burning Man, which offer people a chance to express themselves in new ways, demonstrate just how important self-expression is to human experience.
Self-Expression in Science
Self-expression also has broader social benefits: it spur scientific progress by fostering the creative exploration of unusual ideas.
In a wonderful series of essays, my friend Adam Mastroianni lays out a compelling case for why science proceeds best when scientists are allowed to let their freak flag fly. Scientists, he argues, are worried about the wrong thing. Instead of being concerned about flawed experiments appearing in peer-reviewed journals, they should be worried about the absence of truly transformative studies.
Scientists, in other words, should be focused on increasing, rather than decreasing the risks we take. The more freaky-deaky we get with our experimental methods, the better chance we have of discovering something radically new.
The same thing is true of our culture as a whole. Humans have what psychologists call a status quo bias—a preference for keeping things as they are, even if it makes us worse off. We complacently accept the world the way it is, instead of striving to build a better one. We are hostages to the present.
In sum, there is every reason to believe that, with more self-expression, society would be better-off: more innovative, more energized, and more creative.
Our Moral Duty
Which brings us to our moral duty.
My argument is that each of us has a responsibility to practice self-expression. The reason this is a responsibility, and not just a right, has to do with the effect your behavior has on others. When you practice self-expression, you are doing your part to break the pluralistic ignorance that keeps us locked into the status quo. By flouting a convention, you are signaling that that convention is breakable. And you are freeing other people to follow suit.
To illustrate, let’s return to the famous Asch conformity experiments. Asch explored a variety of situations to see what would lead to more or less conformity.
One of the biggest factors that helped people resist the pressure to conform was the presence of what Asch termed an “ally”—namely, another person in the group who provided the correct response instead of going along with the group.
Ash shows that the presence of a single ally reduced rates of conformity by a full eighty percent.

By expressing yourself, you can be an ally. You can shatter the illusion of homogeneity. In so doing, you provide the space for others to do the same.
Interestingly, John Stuart Mill, the godfather of liberalism, presciently wrote about our duty to resist conformity in his essay On Liberty, written in 1859:
“In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service…Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius.
In other words, self-expression isn’t just something we do for ourselves. It’s also something we do for the people around us.
A Case Study
Consider my brilliant young cousin Noah. Noah has taken to wearing dresses in his daily life sheerly because, in his words, “I like to look ridiculous.”
I sat down with Noah to ask him his views about self-expression. In the course of our conversation, I learned some very interesting things.
For instance, Noah believes that his exercises in self-expression have a filtering effect on his social life: they attract the kinds of people he wants to spend time with and repel the people he wouldn’t want to spent time with anyway. As he puts it,
People who are put off by my wacky visual appearance are not people who I want to talk to anyway.
Spending time with Noah, you come to see the value of self-expression. It shatters prevailing expectations, and in so doing creates an electrifying aura of possibility. It makes you wonder: if this is possible, what other outdated norms can we break?
He says:
The average person doesn't really care what you're doing. They're never going to see you again. To worry what those people think of you seems crazy.
I think we’d all be better off if we took a page from Noah’s book.
Conclusion
I’ve argued that self-expression is something you do not for yourself but for the world. By shattering our slavish acceptance of the status quo, you elevate people’s understanding of what’s possible. And that’s a good thing for everyone.
Not ready to wear a pink tutu to work just yet? Not to worry, there is a whole range of small steps you can take to engage in self-expression:
Next time you’re deciding between purchasing two pairs of shoes, get the crazier ones! (h/t: Jordan Wiley)
High-five a stranger
Get that tattoo you’ve always wanted
Hang a flag out of your bedroom window
Wear that lapel pin your partner gifted you last year
Get unreasonably excited about something
Frolic in the park like everybody’s watching
In other words, there are countless ways both large and small that we can all do our part to resist social compression. Doing so is a gift we give both to ourselves and to the world.