The Herd Instinct

You are on your way to a concert. At an intersection , you encounter a group of people , all staring at the sky. Without even thinking about it, you peer upwards too. Why? Social proof. In the middle of the concert, when the soloist is displaying absolute mastery, someone begins to clap and suddenly the whole room joins in. You do too. Why? Social proof. After the concert is over, you see people in front place a coin on a plate, even though, officially, the service is included in ticket price. What do you do? You probably leave a tip as well.

Social proof, sometimes roughly termed as Herd Instinct, dictates that individuals feel they are behaving when act as the same as other people. In other words, more people who follow a certain idea, better we deem the idea to be. Social proof is evil behind bubbles and stock market panic. It exists in fashion, management techniques, hobbies, religion and diets. It can paralyse whole cultures, such as when sects commit collective suicide.

A simple experiment carried out in the 1950s by legendary psychologist Solomon Asch shows how peer pressure can wrap common sense. A subject is shown a line drawn on paper, and next to it 3 lines- numbered 1,2 and 3- one shorter, one longer and one of same length as original. He or she must indicate which of the 3 lines correspond to the original one. If person is alone in the room, he gives correct answers - unsurprisingly, because the task is really quite simple. Now 5 more people enter the room; they are all actors, which subject doesn't know. One after another, they give wrong answers, saying "number one"; although it's very clear that number 3 is the correct answer. Then it is the subject's turn again. In one third of cases, he will answer incorrectly to match the other people's responses.

Comedy and talk shows use of Social proof by inserting canned laughter at strategic spots, inciting audience to laugh along. One of the most impressive, though troubling, cases of this phenomenon is the famous speech by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, delivered to large audience in 1943. As the war went from bad to worse for Germany, he demanded to know: 'Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?' The crowd roared. If the attendees had been asked individually and anonymously, it is likely that nobody would have consented to this crazy proposal.

The advertising industry benefits greatly from our weakness for Social proof. This works well when a situation is unclear(such as deciding among various car makes, cleaning products etc. with no obvious advantages or disadvantages), and where people 'like you and me' appear.

So, be sceptical whenever a company claims its products is better because it is 'the most popular'. How is a product better simply because it sells the most units? And remember  novelist W.Somerset Maugham's wise words: 'If 50 million people say something foolish, it is still foolish'

Dedicated
To my friends who say certain movie is nice because it has reached 100 crore club or certain Tv serial is good because it has a high TRP,

To Rolf Dobelli (author) ,

Thank You for reading,

A usual ,

Hetansh Shah a.k.a Hetu 

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