A society that fears the different raises its children on a single virtue: to disappear within the line. To choose safety in similarity, not honesty in being themselves. In such a place, the rewarded one is not the one who thinks outside the box, but the one who succeeds in becoming a perfect copy of the box itself; he escapes criticism… yet he does not escape himself.
Since the 1950s, the experiments of the psychologist Solomon Asch (Asch, 1951) have shown that a person may agree with the group even while knowing that it is wrong, simply because he does not want to appear deviant from the line. In a modern revival of the idea, contemporary studies have found that group pressure is still capable of pushing individuals to change their answers even when the truth is clearly in front of them. The fear of isolation, it seems, is stronger than the clarity of conviction.
Reports from the World Health Organization on adolescent health (2024–2025) indicate that peer pressure and the “ideal image” standards manufactured on digital platforms are among the most prominent sources of anxiety for youth; the wider the gap between what a young person lives and what he perceives as “required,” the greater his feeling that he is less than others. A study on peer pressure and phone use (Xu, 2023) shows that some adolescents drift into excessive use not out of desire for the screen, but out of fear of losing their place within the group. As if constant presence were a condition for social survival.
In school, the story takes a clearer form. Research on school climate and bullying (Wang et al., 2013; Waasdorp et al., 2022) indicates that environments characterized by genuine respect exhibit lower likelihoods of targeting different students, while classrooms marked by sarcasm or intense competitiveness become spaces in which the student hides behind what seems “safe,” even if it is far from his conviction. The different one here is not attacked because he is wrong, but because he reminds the group of what it is trying to hide from itself.
And while society fears the different, research tells us something entirely different: the most innovative teams are not those whose members resemble each other, but those in which thinking is diverse and in which what is called psychological safety prevails—the feeling that one can ask, propose, and make mistakes without being excluded. This is what Google’s “Project Aristotle” and other studies on high-performance teams highlighted; performance is not produced by similarity… but by a safe space for difference.
The true scene remains in the small details: when a child voices an unusual opinion at the table, or a student raises his hand with an idea that does not resemble what the class is accustomed to, or a young person proposes a solution that no one has considered. In those moments, without noise, we decide whether difference in this home, this school, and this institution is a window to be opened… or a candle to be extinguished.
A society that fears the different will one day find itself lamenting the absence of innovators, though it was the one that taught them since childhood to fear themselves. For a society that cannot tolerate the differences of its members is condemned to see its image repeated endlessly… and to see not a single new horizon.
