Following the crowd

W pogoni za tłumem

A novelist, W. Somerset Maugham once said that even ‘if 50 million people say something foolish, it is still foolish’ and by no means becomes clever. Obvious as it may seem, there are some psychological mechanisms which in some situations may undermine this claim or at least may make us ponder on it a bit more. For some reason, the novelist made such an observation and felt the urge to verbalise it and spread it out. Possibly, a random situation made him realise that on some occasions the behaviour of human beings is governed by the herd instinct. It is a primitive mechanism which makes an individual feel that they are acting correctly if they behave the same as other people. In other words, the bigger number of people follow a certain idea, the better or truer we deem the idea to be. Even if theoretically, it appears to be absurd, the reality shows that the more people who display a certain kind of behaviour, the more appropriate the behaviour is judged to be by others. We behave like this because in the past, some 50 000 years ago, it was a good survival strategy. In those days, if you had been going through a wild forest with your hunter-gatherer mates and suddenly they had all bolted, what would you have done? Would you have stayed motionless, looking around trying to determine if the animal in front of you is a leathal beast or a harmless herbivore that you could actually hunt? For sure, you would have sprinted after your mates. Those who acted differently from the group, and for sure there were some, were eliminated, quite naturally, from the gene pool. As we are the direct descendants of those who copied the others behaviour, this pattern is deeply rooted in us. Subconsciously, we still use it even if it offers no survival advantage. For example, you are going to a concert and suddenly at a crossroads you see a group of people who are all staring at the sky. Without giving it a thought, you peer upwards too. Or similarly, in the middle of a concert when the soloist is reaching the peak of their mastery, some people begin to clap their hands and immediately the whole room joins in. After the concert, you go to the cloakroom to collect your coat and you observe that the people in front of you place a coin on a plate, even though the cloakroom service is included in the ticket, most probably you would leave a tip as well. In psychology this mechanism is called social proof. It is the evil behind bubbles and stock market panic. It is omnipresent in fashion, management and diets. It can do a lot of harm, for example when members of a sect commit collective suicide.