Can we objectively measure conformism? If so, how? If not, why?

Question

Last summer, I read an essay^1 by Paul Graham called "The Four Quadrants of Conformism". It argued that people's personalities can be categorised on two axes, how conventional- or independent-minded a person is and how passive or aggressive this nature is. The essay also argues that the sizes of these quadrants are unequal size with there being more conventional-minded people than independent-minded people and more people are passive than aggressive in this nature.While the implications of this are quite interesting on their own, I'd like to know if this idea can be empirically tested. Would it be possible to design a system of measurement for these traits and where a person might fall on these axis? Can we make useful predictions about people's interactions based on where their positions on the axes? What would this measurement entail, would it be based on a questionnaire like other psychological studies or something else?1. http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html

webmaven · Accepted Answer

One thing that pg's essay implies is that these two axes are orthogonal. I don't believe that to be the case, though this probably changes depending on how important conforming to any particular position is to the individual's group identity and self-image.
Anyway, it is an interesting model, but the non-ideological formulation isn't actually supported by existing data. You may find the sort of thing you're looking for by looking into the existing research on Big Five personality traits, authoritarianism, conformity, and perhaps conservative vs. liberal political leaning. The mappings aren't straightforward.
Conformity is associated with higher scores in agreeableness and conscientiousness, and low neuroticism.
Authoritarianism is associated with higher scores in conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, and lower openness.
Conservatism is strongly associated with conscientiousness, liberalism with openness and neuroticism. Agreeableness is weakly associated with social conservatism but economic liberalism. These associations are for the general population, and change considerably based on gender and race.
The most difficult aspect of pg's model to interpret is the active/passive axis, which doesn't map cleanly to any of the Big Five (which is somewhat of a red flag). Instead, we would have to cherry pick individual facets of the Big Five and try to construct a new active/passive composite axis. Candidates, I think, would be the activity and assertiveness facets of extraversion, the self-discipline facet of conscientiousness, and the impulsiveness facet of neuroticism being associated with an 'active' person whether conformist or non, while passivity might be associated with the compliance and modesty facets of agreeableness, the deliberation facet of conscientiousness, and the self-consciousness facet of neuroticism. This is all pretty speculative, though, and I suspect that active/passive is too dependent on context to be considered a personality trait, other than the active facet of extraversion, which has more to do with energy than a decision to act overtly.