That feeling of loneliness.
The urge to have friends.
The desire to be part of the group.
This isn't some sort of mental failing on your part but a biological imperative hard wired into our bodies through a system of punishments and rewards through our endocrine system. It can even cross species boundaries these biochemical responses are so strong.
This is what distinguishes you, a herd animal, from an individualistic loner animal like the Bobcat that only interacts with others of it's own kind in order to mate.
You share this trait with insects:
Birds:
Mammals small:
And large:
This trait has kept humans safe for millennia. The protections offered by the hive are well recognized and exploited quite well by religious, educational, and commercial entities of all stripes.
Dominance of Conformity
Social influences affect behavior via two different mechanisms.
The first is informational. As noted, what other people do, or say, carries an informational externality; if many other people go to a certain movie, or refuse to use drugs, or carry guns, observers are given a signal about what it makes sense to do.
The second mechanism is reputational. Even if people do not believe that what other people do provides information about what should be done, they may think that the actions of others provide information about what other people think should be done. Thus each person’s expressive actions come with a reputational externality. People care about their reputations, and hence they may do what they think other people think they should do, whether or not they believe that they should do it. Reputational considerations may, for example, lead people to obey or not to obey the law, smoke cigarettes, buy certain cars, drive while drunk, help others, or talk about political issues in a certain way. They exert a ubiquitous influence on behavior.
The advertising industry has used this psychosocial phenomenon against consumers for decades:
When groups of consumers share information or express their opinions about products and services, their attitudes or behavior sometime align without centralized coordination, a phenomenon known as herding.
Building on pattern-based explanations of herding from the cognitive science literature, we propose a framework to elucidate herding behavior based on three dimensions: the speed of contagion, i.e., the extent to which the behavior spreads in a given time, the number of individuals, i.e., the proportion of the whole population expressing the behavior, and the uniformity of direction, i.e., the extent to which the mass behavior is increasingly uniform with one variant becoming dominant.
Based on these dimensions, we differentiate eight patterns of herding behavior from slowly diffusing, small and disparate groups through to rapidly spreading, massive herds expressing a convergent behavior. We explore these herding patterns in an online setting, measuring their prevalence using over four thousand streams of data from the online micro-blogging application, Twitter. We find that all eight patterns occur in the empirical data set although some patterns are rare, particularly those where a convergent behavior rapidly spreads through the population. Importantly, those occurrences that develop into the pattern we call “stampeding,” i.e., the rapid spread of a dominant opinion expressed by many people, generally follow a consistent development path. The proposed framework can help managers to identify such noteworthy herds in real time, and represents a first step in anticipating this form of group behavior.
As you can see even what and how we tweet is looked at for herd behaviors by advertising entities.
This was not always the case. Early advertising may have been limited to placing a barrel outside a coopers, for instance. But showing your company was head and shoulders above the average company soon was seen as a way to gain customers.
This advertisement from the late 1800's is a furniture company displaying an image of their factory, a multistory brick building, instead of their product. In the throes of the Gilded Age the impression that the company that made furniture expected to last generations was not a 'fly by night' operation intent on shipping a card or pasteboard dresser in lieu of a wooden one. This advertisement is an example of how a company shows it is not a part of the herd using period imagery.
The advent of psychiatry created a new mindset about advertising. Exploiting the urges programmed into humans in order to maximize effectiveness.
This WWI era advertisement uses infants to show the universality of obeying the posters instructions. Notice the dependence on text more heavily in delivering the message as opposed to the posters from the WPA era:
After the advent of the Great Depression the WPA had a program for artists to create posters. Some for information about social programs and services like the Postal Service. Others you can see the influence of tribal urges manipulation in the use of health as a way to get attention to the message. The fastest way to be rejected by the herd is to become ill and potentially contagious to other members.
The use of the amygdala in advertising has an early start as this informative poster attempts to share the importance of not littering. The free speech decision limiting yelling fire years prior indicates that society was quite aware of the power of words on herd behavior. Especially when the stakes are high or perceived to be so.
(Do I see the hand of Geisel in those trees?)
Appealing to acceptance by the herd and stoking the fear center of the brain this poster also imparts an important message visually and through language that manipulates the human desire to be a part of the herd.
This image starkly frightens behavior modification in order to curb drinking and driving.:
Something I notice about the post Wall Street Crash posters is their absence of the frillery or decorative detail that was a hallmark of 1920's art.
The herd instinct although can be used for good or simply to hawk wares. But as we see in our current political generation the exploitation of the amygdala is key to most advertisements of our age. And in the worse case scenario it is used to make the observer act against their own best interest thinking it is best for the herd. Because even though herds are amorphous beings there still is the urge to obey to hierarchy of social dominance and obey authority.
More on that after the Fleur-de-Kos
Would Americans have been more likely than Germans to have resisted Nazism?
Ultimately, Milgram was forced to abandon his initial assumptions about “cultures of obedience.” As he put it, assessing his experiments, “Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not.”
Milgram’s experiment was repeated by other psychologists around the world, who reported almost no significant regional or cultural variation. From Europe to Asia to Africa, roughly the same percentage of people could be quickly induced to inflict grievous harm on innocent strangers.
Other experiments on the effects of obedience on perceptions and behavior were conducted by social psychologists elsewhere, and generally produced results consistent with Milgram’s findings. At Stanford University, for instance, Dr. Philip Zimbardo created a mock prison, assigning students randomly to play the roles of prisoners and guards. The “prisoners” had to wear prison garb and stocking caps and were assigned numbers in lieu of names; the “guards” were issued truncheons and mirrored sunglasses. After only a week, Zimbardo was forced to end the experiment prematurely: the “guards” had begun to humiliate and abuse the “prisoners,” and several “prisoners” seemed close to experiencing mental breakdowns.
Zimbardo’s conclusion: most people automatically begin to play the social “roles” that they’re assigned, and those roles can quickly trump their individual personalities.
So it wasn't a cultural failing that created the horrors of the Holocaust but the exploitation of the very human need to be obedient and show deference to herd wisdom.
At Princeton, psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson conducted a famous series of experiments known as the “Good Samaritan” experiments. The experimental subjects were Princeton Theological Seminary students, who were told that as part of a study of vocational preferences, they should prepare a short practice sermon that would later be delivered in a building a short walk away. Some of the students were then instructed that they were running late, and should rush to deliver their practice sermon. Others were told that they had plenty of time to get to the location at which they would deliver their sermon. Darley and Batson had an assistant planted along the route the students would have to take, and when each student approached, the assistant feigned sudden illness, slumping over, coughing and groaning. Darley and Batson found that although 63 percent of the students who had been told there was no rush offered to help the apparent victim, only 10 percent of the divinity students who had been instructed to hurry offered to help.Even those students who had just finished preparing sermons on the parable of the Good Samaritan were more influenced by the experimenter’s instructions to hurry than by the ethical lesson of the story on which they planned to preach.
Seminary students after preparing a sermon on good works at a rate of ten percent would disobey their instructor to perform the very acts they were just studying. This says much about the human need to conform at all costs.
But what we see socially over and over again with increasing frequency, not surprising for the economic conditions, are exhortations to engage in destructive herd behavior. I'm not just talking about the no taxes crowd either. But anti immigration. And even sports "tribes" are increasingly crossing social boundaries in destructive ways.
In 2009 The RAND Group released a study on the factors in the life cycle of terrorism. It is basically 500+ pages of social scientists telling policy makers to look before they leap. But two important points they make about the most destructive form of destructive tribalism, terrorism, are these. One once started you will have terrorists for that entire generation, so don't cultivate them in the first place is the best way to quell terrorism. And that social acceptance is key to the proliferation of terrorism. That yes indeed the herd can leap from the cliff.