When there’s a whole group of people who are joined in their need to see it one way. That doesn’t make them right. It makes you brave.
The cost of dissent is not being wrong — it’s being alone. This maps directly to why paradigm-lock-in is so stable: consensus feels like evidence, and the person who breaks ranks bears the full weight of social punishment while the group bears none. See also The Exasperations of Expertise — the expert who sees what the crowd cannot is not rewarded for clarity but punished for illegibility.
Extroverts are subject to stronger mimesis and thus do better in healthier cultures. Introverts outperform in unhealthy cultures via insulating themselves from that.
Mimesis is environment-dependent leverage. In a good culture, absorbing the group signal is an advantage — you get pulled toward better norms. In a broken one, the same absorption becomes contamination. This is why natural-maniacs thrive in specific contexts: their partial insulation from social consensus protects them from groupthink, but also makes them abrasive in environments that run on conformity. The introvert’s edge in unhealthy cultures is the same mechanism described in locally-optimal — withdrawal is a defensive strategy that happens to be adaptive when the surrounding signal is toxic.
You can’t get people to change by judging them or evoking any kind of negative emotion. This is because most people already hate themselves.
Judgment fails as a change mechanism because it arrives at a mailbox that is already full. Self-acceptance names the underlying structure: self-rejection is not a void waiting to be filled but an active process already running. Adding external judgment to internal self-hatred just reinforces the existing pattern. The only lever that works is the one described in focusing — meeting the self-rejection with curiosity rather than more force.