The individual's instinctive desire to be identical in action with other members of his group, from the collars and clothes he wears to the way he brings up his children, is greatly reinforced by the punishment meted out to those who differ from the majority. This may vary from ridicule, as in the case of the laughter that greets the poet's proverbial long hair and flowing tie, the foreigner's accent, or a straw hat in April, to the confinement and privation that are the penalties for any marked infringement of the accepted modes of life. Even when the punishments are slight, they are effective. A man who has no moral or religious scruples with reference to gambling on any day of the week will, to avoid the social ostracism of his neighbors, refrain from playing cards on his front porch on Sunday. For no other reason than to avoid being consciously different, many a man will not wear cool white clothes on a hot day in his office who will wear them on a cool evening at the seashore. THE EFFECT OF GREGARIOUSNESS ON INNOVATION. A strong instinctive tendency to community of action and thought is in large part responsible for the comparative absence of innovation in either of these fields. A premium is put upon the conventional, the customary, the common, both in the instinctive satisfaction they give the individual, and in the high value set upon them by society. In advanced societies, however, the habit of inquiry and originality may itself come to be endorsed by the majority, as it is among scientists and artists. The herd instinct need not always act on the side of unreason. Among the intellectual classes, it is already enlisted on the side of free inquiry, which among scholars is the fundamental common habit. If rationality were once to become really respectable, if we feared the entertaining of an unverifiable opinion with the warmth with which we fear using the wrong implement at the dinner table, if the thought of holding a prejudice disgusted us as does a foul disease, then the dangers of man's suggestibility would be turned into advantages.[1] [Footnote 1: Trotter; _loc. cit._, p. 45.] SYMPATHY (A SPECIALIZATION OF GREGARIOUSNESS). Sympathy, in the strict psychological sense of the term, means a "suffering with, the experiencing of any feeling or emotion when and because we observe in other persons or creatures the expression of that feeling of emotion."[2] The behavior of animals exhibits the external features of sympathetic action very clearly. "Two dogs begin to growl or fight, and at once all the dogs within sound and sight stiffen themselves, and show every symptom of anger. Or one beast in a herd stands arrested, gazing in curiosity on some unfamiliar object, and presently his fellows also, to whom the object may be invisible, display curiosity and come up to join in the examination of the object."[1] [Footnote 2: McDougall: _loc. cit._, p. 92.] [Footnote 1: McDougall: _loc. cit._, p. 93.]