The Conformity Challenge: Why Higher Education Needs Productive Deviance

Edition 22: Institutional Effectiveness Weekly

Welcome to Institutional Effectiveness Weekly on Substack

I’m launching this newsletter on Substack with an edition that some of you may have already seen.

In mid-December, I published “The Conformity Challenge” on LinkedIn—an analysis inspired by psychologist Adam Mastroianni’s essay “The Decline of Deviance” (https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-decline-of-deviance) on his Substack, Experimental History. It examined how Americans have become systematically more risk-averse and it inspired me to contemplate what that means for higher education’s mission to foster intellectual courage.

But December 17 is perhaps the worst possible day to publish a 2,500-word analytical piece. Holiday mode. End-of-semester exhaustion. Checked-out audiences. It got buried.

More importantly, it deserves to live where it was inspired—on Substack, alongside Mastroianni’s work and the broader community of thinkers grappling with questions that span disciplines and defy neat categorization.

So I’m republishing it here as my Substack launch, with a few small revisions. If you read it on LinkedIn, you’ll find the substance unchanged. If you missed it during the holidays, welcome to something a bit different from my usual evidence-based ROI analysis.

This is exactly why Substack is the right home for this newsletter. It’s where serious intellectual work gets the attention it deserves, where conversations happen across disciplines, where readers engage with ideas rather than scroll past them, and where content doesn’t disappear into algorithm-driven feeds after 48 hours.

What This Means Going Forward:

Starting January 13, full editions publish here first, every Tuesday at 9:00 AM EST. You’ll get 1,500-2,500 words of evidence-based analysis with comprehensive citations and practical frameworks—delivered reliably to your inbox, archived permanently, and owned by you, not LinkedIn.

LinkedIn continues as an amplification channel. I’ll post 300-500 word summaries with key findings and links to complete editions here. You can follow on LinkedIn, subscribe on Substack, or both. Your choice.

But if you want the full analysis with all the research, citations, and implementation guidance—that lives here now.

The Conformity Challenge: Why Higher Education Needs Productive Deviance

Edition 22: Institutional Effectiveness Weekly

Psychologist Adam Mastroianni recently published “The Decline of Deviance,” synthesizing data showing that Americans have become systematically more conformist and risk-averse over the past four decades. I started reading it thinking it would be an interesting cultural analysis. By the end, I was scribbling notes about implications for everything we do in higher education.

The basic finding: deviance is declining across the board. Crime, yes—but also geographic mobility, cultural experimentation, scientific innovation, and intellectual risk-taking. Students are safer and better behaved than ever. They’re also more reluctant to challenge ideas, pursue unconventional paths, or take the intellectual risks that deep learning requires.

This matters because universities exist precisely to foster the kinds of productive deviance—challenging established ideas, taking intellectual risks, pursuing unconventional research—that increasingly risk-averse students find uncomfortable. If Mastroianni’s analysis is correct, we’re not just observing a generational shift in student behavior. We’re witnessing a fundamental tension between societal trends toward conformity and higher education’s core mission.

So here’s my response—drawing connections to myprevious work on leadership, culture, evidence-based practice, and what all of this means for institutional effectiveness.

The Data: Deviance in Decline

Psychologist Adam Mastroianni recently synthesized data from multiple sources documenting what he calls “the decline of deviance”—a striking pattern showing that Americans have become systematically more conformist and risk-averse over the past four decades (Mastroianni, 2025).

The evidence spans negative, neutral, and positive forms of deviance:

Negative Deviance (Declining): High school students are less than half as likely to drink alcohol as they were in the 1990s. They’re also substantially less likely to smoke, use drugs, have sex, get in fights, or bring weapons to school (CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 2023). Crime rates have fallen by approximately 50% over the past thirty years (Pew Research Center, 2024). Even serial killing has declined precipitously since the 1980s (FBI Uniform Crime Reports).

Neutral Deviance (Declining): Geographic mobility has steadily decreased since the mid-1980s, with Americans now half as likely to move as they were forty years ago—a trend driven primarily by young adults (U.S. Census Bureau, 2023; Richmond Federal Reserve, 2025). The typical American adult now lives only 18 miles from their mother (New York Times, 2015).

Positive Deviance (Declining): Cultural stagnation characterizes contemporary art and entertainment. Before 2000, only 25% of top-grossing films were sequels, prequels, or franchise extensions; now that figure exceeds 75% (Mastroianni, 2023). Scientific papers have converged on identical formatting (nearly 100% of medical journal articles now use the Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion structure), and the rate of disruptive scientific discoveries has declined substantially (Sollaci & Pereira, 2004; Park et al., 2023).

The timeline matters: these trends began in the 1980s-1990s, well before smartphones and social media, suggesting deeper societal forces at work rather than purely technological explanations.

Why This Matters for Higher Education

Universities face a unique challenge: their fundamental mission requires fostering intellectual risk-taking, critical inquiry, and creative deviance—precisely the behaviors declining across society. This creates three interconnected problems:

Mission Compromise: Higher education exists to develop critical thinkers who question assumptions, challenge orthodoxies, and generate novel ideas. Research consistently demonstrates that intellectual risk-taking—defined as “engaging in learning behaviors (sharing tentative ideas, asking questions, attempting new things) that place learners at risk of making mistakes or appearing less competent than others”—correlates strongly with deep learning, creative thinking, and innovation (Beghetto & Baxter, 2012; Clifford, 1991). When students systematically avoid intellectual risk, institutions cannot fulfill their educational purpose regardless of pedagogical quality or resource investment.

Leadership Development Crisis: Organizations increasingly demand employees capable of independent thinking, challenging assumptions, and driving innovation. Yet research indicates students now approach learning with heightened risk aversion. Studies document that students “generally regard intellectual risk-taking as positive but are reluctant to take such risks,” citing concerns about grades, peer judgment, and instructor evaluation (Teagarden et al., 2018). This creates a pipeline problem: institutions graduate students credentialed but underprepared for leadership roles requiring intellectual courage.

Research and Innovation Implications: Mastroianni documents what researcher Ruxandra Teslo calls “the flight of the weird nerd from academia”—the pattern whereby individuals comfortable with intellectual nonconformity increasingly avoid or leave academic careers (Teslo, 2023). This matters because unconventional thinkers drive scientific breakthroughs. When academic environments systematically select for conformity, research innovation suffers.

Evidence on Campus

The conformity challenge manifests in multiple ways across institutional operations:

Classroom Dynamics: Faculty across disciplines report declining student willingness to engage in classroom debate, voice contrarian opinions, or challenge instructor assertions. Research on intellectual risk-taking in higher education finds that while institutions frequently invoke the concept in mission statements and pedagogical frameworks, actual classroom practices often penalize rather than reward such risk-taking (Clark & Soutter, 2022). Students perceive—often accurately—that conforming to instructor expectations produces better grades than genuine intellectual exploration.

Major Selection and Career Pathways: Elite institutions see increasingly homogenous career outcomes despite diverse student interests. Fifty percent of Harvard graduates enter finance, technology, and consulting—not because half of incoming students dream of creating PowerPoint decks, but because these paths offer safety, prestige, and deferred decision-making (Harvard Crimson, 2024). Paradoxically, students from the wealthiest backgrounds—those with the greatest financial cushion to pursue risky paths—demonstrate the highest rates of safe career selection.

Geographic and Intellectual Immobility: The declining geographic mobility documented by Mastroianni reflects and reinforces intellectual conservatism. Students increasingly attend universities close to home, remain in familiar geographic regions after graduation, and limit exposure to different intellectual and cultural environments. This geographic clustering contributes to reduced cognitive diversity on campuses and in professional networks.

Curriculum and Assessment Pressures: Mastroianni’s observation that scientific papers have converged on identical formatting reflects broader pressures toward standardization. Accreditation requirements, learning outcome assessments, and accountability frameworks—while serving important quality assurance functions—can inadvertently reward conformity over innovation in curriculum design and pedagogical approaches.

Root Causes: The Risk-Averse Context

Mastroianni identifies a compelling core mechanism: life has become dramatically less dangerous, which paradoxically makes small risks feel terrifying. Federal agencies’ calculation of the “value of a statistical life” has increased faster than GDP growth, suggesting people value safety more intensely as baseline risks decrease (Linch, 2025).

This creates what ecologists call a “slow life history strategy”—when environments feel safe and predictable, organisms invest in long-term planning, risk avoidance, and careful preservation of accumulated advantages rather than pursuing high-risk, high-reward strategies (Griskevicius et al., 2013).

For traditional college-age students, this manifests distinctly:

Credential Stakes: The perceived cost of educational “failure” has increased dramatically. Student debt levels, competitive graduate admissions, and credential inflation mean students perceive they have more to lose from unconventional choices. Research on loan aversion documents that 20-40% of students exhibit reluctance to borrow for education—driven partly by excessive risk aversion about uncertain future earnings (Boatman et al., 2017). This financial anxiety extends to academic choices, discouraging intellectual experimentation that might affect GPA.

Parental Investment and Expectations: Intensive parenting practices—what sociologists term “concerted cultivation”—create students who excel at meeting adult expectations but struggle with autonomous risk-taking (Lareau, 2011). Parents who invested substantial resources in educational advantages understandably want safe returns, creating implicit pressure toward conventional choices.

Institutional Risk Aversion: Universities themselves have become increasingly risk-averse. Rankings optimization discourages pedagogical experimentation. Concerns about enrollment, retention, and completion rates incentivize institutions to smooth student pathways rather than introduce productive challenge. The very accountability systems designed to improve outcomes can paradoxically discourage the intellectual risk-taking that produces deep learning.

Strategic Responses

Addressing this challenge requires institutions to deliberately create environments where productive deviance can flourish. This connects directly to leadership work explored in Edition 5: executive leaders must model and reward the very behaviors students find uncomfortable.

Create Psychologically Safe Environments for Intellectual Risk:

Research demonstrates that students’ willingness to take intellectual risks correlates strongly with perceptions of teacher support, classroom climate, and assessment practices (Dachner et al., 2017; Beghetto, 2009). Specific practices that foster intellectual risk-taking include:

• Normalize Mistake-Making: Explicitly teach that intellectual growth requires productive failure. Faculty who share their own intellectual mistakes and learning processes model this effectively.

• Redesign Assessment: Research indicates assessment practices significantly influence risk-taking behavior (Clark & Soutter, 2022). When every assignment carries high stakes, students optimize for grade protection rather than learning. Incorporating low-stakes practice opportunities, revision processes, and assessments that reward intellectual exploration encourages calculated risk-taking.

• Facilitate Structured Controversy: Create assignments and discussions that require students to argue positions they don’t initially hold, engage with uncomfortable ideas, and defend unconventional interpretations. The Harkness Method—a discussion-based pedagogical approach—has been studied specifically for its capacity to build intellectual risk-taking cultures (Soutter & Clark, 2021).

Reward Intellectual Courage Explicitly:

If institutions value intellectual risk-taking, they must recognize and reward it systematically rather than merely endorsing it rhetorically. This requires:

• Revise Evaluation Criteria: Include intellectual risk-taking as an explicit evaluation dimension in courses, particularly those central to general education and major requirements. Students respond to what institutions measure.

• Celebrate Unconventional Pathways: Highlight alumni who pursued non-traditional careers, changed fields, or took intellectual risks that initially seemed impractical. This provides social proof that deviation from standard paths leads to success.

• Protect Faculty Experimentation: Junior faculty facing tenure review perceive risks in pedagogical innovation or unconventional research agendas. Departments and institutions that explicitly value such experimentation—even when it produces “failures”—signal commitment to productive deviance.

Institutional Leadership Modeling:

Edition 5 examined how executive leadership shapes campus culture. This challenge requires leaders who model intellectual humility, acknowledge uncertainty, and visibly engage with ideas that challenge their assumptions. Practically, this means:

• Town Halls That Include Dissent: Create forums where students, faculty, and staff can voice disagreement with institutional decisions without professional consequences. Modeling receptiveness to challenge demonstrates that productive conflict serves institutional interests.

• Strategic Planning That Embraces Experimentation: Typical strategic planning processes optimize for consensus and avoid controversy (Edition 7). Plans that explicitly allocate resources for experimental initiatives—with acknowledged possibility of failure—signal institutional commitment to innovation over conformity.

• Admissions and Curriculum Diversification: Enrollment strategies that optimize purely for metrics (test scores, GPA) select for students who excel at conformity. Admissions processes that weigh evidence of intellectual independence, unconventional achievements, or demonstrated persistence through failure identify students likely to contribute to campus intellectual diversity.

Connect to Evidence-Based Practice:

Edition 11 explored fostering evidence-based cultures. The conformity challenge requires institutions to examine data on their own environments:

• Survey Campus Climate: Measure students’ perceptions of psychological safety, willingness to voice dissenting opinions, and comfort with intellectual risk-taking. Disaggregate by demographic groups to identify populations experiencing particular pressure toward conformity.

• Track Pedagogical Innovation: Monitor whether faculty feel supported in experimenting with teaching methods, assignments, or assessment approaches. Innovation requires tolerance for approaches that may initially underperform conventional methods.

• Assess Intellectual Diversity: Examine the range of perspectives represented in curriculum, campus speakers, and intellectual debate. As discussed in Edition 17 (Trust and Intellectual Diversity), campuses perceived as ideologically homogenous face particular challenges in encouraging genuine intellectual risk-taking.

Practical Implications for Institutional Effectiveness

IE professionals play critical roles in helping institutions navigate this challenge:

Measure What Matters: Traditional metrics—retention, completion, GPA—don’t capture intellectual risk-taking or its outcomes. Consider tracking:

• Student engagement in academic activities requiring intellectual risk (research projects, creative work, presentations)

• Post-graduation outcomes disaggregated by academic risk-taking (do students who pursued unconventional paths achieve meaningful outcomes?)

• Alumni perceptions of how their education prepared them for intellectual challenge and innovation

Communicate Nuanced Success: Help institutions move beyond binary success/failure frameworks. Students who change majors, extend time-to-degree to pursue dual interests, or graduate into non-traditional careers may represent successes even when they complicate efficiency metrics.

Support Cultural Change: Provide data that challenges assumptions about safe paths. For instance, evidence that graduates who pursued unconventional majors or career paths achieve comparable or superior outcomes can reduce institutional pressure toward conformity.

Conclusion: Purpose-Driven Risk

Mastroianni concludes his analysis observing that the decline of deviance represents humanity’s remarkable success at creating safe, prosperous societies—while noting that “for the first time in history, weirdness is a choice. And it’s a hard one, because we have more to lose than ever” (Mastroianni, 2025).

Higher education institutions face a related choice: whether to accommodate risk-averse students by creating frictionless pathways that optimize retention and completion, or to deliberately introduce productive challenge that fosters the intellectual courage their missions claim to develop.

The evidence suggests these goals need not conflict. Research demonstrates that psychologically safe environments—where students feel supported, mistakes are normalized, and risk-taking is explicitly valued—produce both higher retention and deeper learning (Beghetto, 2009; Dachner et al., 2017). The question is whether institutions will invest in creating such environments.

Edition 20 documented workforce-aligned programs delivering strong outcomes—evidence that higher education can respond effectively to documented needs. The conformity challenge represents a different kind of workforce need: not specific technical skills but the intellectual dispositions—curiosity, critical thinking, comfort with uncertainty—that enable individuals to navigate complex, changing environments.

Institutions that deliberately foster productive deviance while supporting students through the discomfort of intellectual risk-taking will develop graduates capable of the innovation, leadership, and creative problem-solving that our rapidly changing world demands. Those that optimize purely for student comfort and completion efficiency will credential students thoroughly but educate them inadequately.

As Mastroianni notes, someone must have “the courage to climb down into” the “illegal holes in the basement” where genuine innovation happens (Mastroianni, 2025). Higher education’s fundamental purpose is developing people with that courage. The conformity challenge asks whether we’ll fulfill it.

References

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Beghetto, R. A., & Baxter, J. A. (2012). Exploring student beliefs and understanding in elementary science and mathematics. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 49(7), 942-960. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.21018

Boatman, A., Evans, B. J., & Soliz, A. (2017). Understanding loan aversion in education: Evidence from high school seniors, community college students, and adults. AERA Open, 3(1), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858416683649

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023). Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report: 2013-2023. https://www.cdc.gov/yrbs/dstr/index.html

Clark, S., & Soutter, M. (2022). Growth mindset & intellectual risk-taking: Disentangling conflated concepts. Phi Delta Kappan, 104(1), 18-23. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00317217221123650

Clifford, M. M. (1991). Risk taking: Theoretical, empirical, and educational considerations. Educational Psychologist, 26(3-4), 263-297. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00461520.1991.9653135

Dachner, A. M., Miguel, R. F., & Patena, R. A. (2017). Risky business: Understanding student intellectual risk taking in management education. Journal of Management Education, 41(3), 346-378. https://doi.org/10.1177/1052562917695775

Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2024). Uniform Crime Reports. U.S. Department of Justice. https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/more-fbi-services-and-information/ucr

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Harvard Crimson. (2024). Senior Survey 2024. https://features.thecrimson.com/2024/senior-survey

Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life (2nd ed.). University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520949904

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Why Are We All Cowards?

Mastroianni, A. (2023). Pop culture has become an oligopoly. Experimental History.

Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly

Mastroianni, A. (2025). The decline of deviance. Experimental History.

The Decline of Deviance

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Sollaci, L. B., & Pereira, M. G. (2004). The introduction, methods, results, and discussion (IMRAD) structure: A fifty-year survey. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 92(3), 364-367. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-introduction,-methods,-results,-and-discussion-Sollaci-Pereira/fb17391a78df98af2b6e65a38fe878809652f53d?utm_source=direct_link

Soutter, M., & Clark, S. (2021). Building a culture of intellectual risk-taking: Isolating the pedagogical elements of the Harkness method. Journal of Education, 1-12. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220574211037747

Teagarden, A., Commer, C., Cooke, A., & Mando, J. (2018). Intellectual risk in the writing classroom: Navigating tensions in educational values and classroom practice. Composition Studies, 46(2), 56-77.

https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1196769

Teslo, R. (2023). The flight of the weird nerd from academia. Writing Ruxandra.

The flight of the Weird Nerd from academia

U.S. Census Bureau. (2023). Historical Migration/Geographic Mobility Tables. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/geographic-mobility/historic.html