One interesting aspect to this equation is the invisibility of risk or harm. Conformism seems safe, because it distributes responsibility for any given choice amongst all those others, leaving very little burden of responsibility on oneself. And it seems easy because you have delegated so much of the thinking to the "others". Striking out on one's own line of thought has obvious risks including making mistakes through lack of data available to "all the others", and ostracism.

But the risks of herd behavior are extraordinarily high even though they are less visible. They include corruption, loss of the power of self-determination, and agreeing with toxic assumptions, for example--=standards of beauty, importances, degrees of desirability of some things or conditions over others, and a lot of tacit biases which one would not want to take onboard if they were made explicit.

We're fortunate that the risks usually don't include physical harassment, imprisonment, or other concomitants of independent thought in totalitarian societies.

A