I think so. Or, taking the specific kind of boldness lsusr mentions—making statements without qualifications that might make them sound weaker—this is a thing one will very often hear from religious or political fanatics, who may well have arrived at their views by pure conformism.
Or maybe a bunch of your friends join a secret society with a scary initiation ritual, and you go ahead with it because you want to be like your friends. Or you’re part of a culture in which men who reach adolescence are expected to go and hunt a tiger or stay in the wilderness for a week or something, and you go ahead and do it because that’s what everybody does. (Of course you might also be doing it because if you don’t the tribal elders will kill you, in which case it wouldn’t count as daring.) Or you’re a member of the Westboro Baptist Church and you go with everyone else to picket military funerals with signs saying GOD HATES FAGS and GOD HATES AMERICA, even though you’re worried that someone in the crowd may pick a fight. (This one is marginal, because someone in that position is nonconformist relative to the culture at large but conformist relative to what directly surrounds them. I think the latter is probably the thing that’s both harder and more important to escape.)
I think so. Or, taking the specific kind of boldness lsusr mentions—making statements without qualifications that might make them sound weaker—this is a thing one will very often hear from religious or political fanatics, who may well have arrived at their views by pure conformism.
Or maybe a bunch of your friends join a secret society with a scary initiation ritual, and you go ahead with it because you want to be like your friends. Or you’re part of a culture in which men who reach adolescence are expected to go and hunt a tiger or stay in the wilderness for a week or something, and you go ahead and do it because that’s what everybody does. (Of course you might also be doing it because if you don’t the tribal elders will kill you, in which case it wouldn’t count as daring.) Or you’re a member of the Westboro Baptist Church and you go with everyone else to picket military funerals with signs saying GOD HATES FAGS and GOD HATES AMERICA, even though you’re worried that someone in the crowd may pick a fight. (This one is marginal, because someone in that position is nonconformist relative to the culture at large but conformist relative to what directly surrounds them. I think the latter is probably the thing that’s both harder and more important to escape.)