But surprisingly, the New Dawn listeners’ norms shifted anyway. They became less likely to advise their children to marry only within their own ethnic group. They grew more tolerant of dissent, and were more likely to say trauma survivors should talk about their struggles with someone. Her experiment showed, in essence, that we will often uphold whatever we perceive the norm to be, even if our minds don’t change accordingly. People will endorse a norm even when their personal beliefs completely contradict it. Just ask any “cool boss” who has ever drug-tested an employee.

To root us back in our far, far less important example: Our fellow spa-goers still thought being naked was shameful. But they did it anyway because the teenage clerks in the lobby told them to.

After our naked time, my friend and I donned the spa-provided orange uniforms to go to a coed area, where we would sit in a variety of gem-encrusted rooms. There’s an amethyst room, a charcoal room, and a room that has thousands of tiny clay balls rolling around the floor. They provide a range of healing properties, as long as what you need to be healed from is not having enough strange smells in your life.

In the “cold” room, whose walls are covered in ice, a group of twenty-something guys sat on little stone stools. Three were bearded, one clean-shaven. The Beards talked jovially among themselves, while No Beard, who seemed to have been dragged to the spa by the others, gazed sullenly at the tile floor.

The Beards talked about how funny it was that everyone was naked. (If you break the norms, you have to make fun of yourself for doing so, thus neutralizing your original infraction and making yourself, once again, a norm follower.)

“Let’s go to the clay ball room next!” one of the Beards yelped.

“I think,” No Beard said, “I’ve seen enough balls today already.”

Compare all of this to the experience of Annette Kellerman, one of the first women to attempt to swim the English Channel. In 1907, she appeared on Revere Beach near Boston wearing a one-piece bathing costume with short sleeves and pant legs that ended two inches above her knees. To us, she would have looked like a woman dressed in modest shorts and a tank top.

And yet, “a shocked howl went up and down the land,” the New York Times wrote in 1951.29