Wisdom of the Crowd, Madness of the Mob
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them.” — Gustave Le Bon
Welcome!
“A mob is not, as is so often said, mindless. A mob is single-minded.”
~ Teju Cole ~
We are not only influenced by our tribes, we are influenced other groups around us. We use them to inform us, to encourage us, to entertain us, and (sometimes) to lead us. When a group grows into a crowd it can become an entity of it’s own where its member’s autonomy gives way to the single mindedness of the mob.
Understanding these influences and how they operate allows us to maintain our autonomy and agency in moments of chaos and uncertainty.
Oxytocin
Our desire to join and remain in groups is facilitated by the hormone oxytocin, which assists social bonding. The brain chemical has a role in pair bonding, maternal bonding, in-group/out-group bias, trust, and situational honesty.
Oxytocin is not only correlated with the preferences of individuals to associate with members of their own group, but it is also evident during conflicts between members of different groups. During conflict, individuals receiving nasally administered oxytocin demonstrate more frequent defense-motivated responses toward in-group members than out-group members. Further, oxytocin was correlated with participant desire to protect vulnerable in-group members, despite that individual's attachment to the conflict.[94] Similarly, it has been demonstrated that when oxytocin is administered, individuals alter their subjective preferences in order to align with in-group ideals over out-group ideals.[95] These studies demonstrate that oxytocin is associated with intergroup dynamics. Further, oxytocin influences the responses of individuals in a particular group to those of another group. The in-group bias is evident in smaller groups; however, it can also be extended to groups as large as one's entire country leading toward a tendency of strong national zeal. A study done in the Netherlands showed that oxytocin increased the in-group favoritism of their nation while decreasing acceptance of members of other ethnicities and foreigners.[96] People also show more affection for their country's flag while remaining indifferent to other cultural objects when exposed to oxytocin.[97] It has thus been hypothesized that this hormone may be a factor in xenophobictendencies secondary to this effect. Thus, oxytocin appears to affect individuals at an international level where the in-group becomes a specific "home" country and the out-group grows to include all other countries.
When we gather in groups our oxytocin levels increase and experience changes from a purely individual experience to a shared group experience. You may have had this experience when attending a concert or a sporting event. It also explains why the emergence of home theaters with their big screens and custom sound systems have not totally replace the movie theater. Research shows that that movie watchers enjoy a movie more when surrounded by others in a theater — the energy of the crowd is contagious.
Groups inform those around them
As we covered in a previous essay, humans have a limited ability to take in and process information. To compensate, the mind subconsciously checks the actions and reactions of those around to determine how it should react in uncertain situations (informational social influence).
“If everyone you knew jumped off a bridge, would you too?” Dr. Roger asked.
David had heard this before and knew you were supposed to say no. But was that really true? If everyone jumped off a bridge, maybe there was a good reason. Maybe the bridge was on fire.If anything, the guy who didn’t jump was the crazy one.”
~ John M. Cusick ~
The bystander effect
During most of our existence we encounter familiar situations and we respond with a practiced response. These moments require little conscious thought, such as stepping over a curb or opening a door. When we encounter something unexpected and volatile, such as a confrontation on the street, most of us don’t have a preprogrammed response — we freeze and assess. In these moments the subconscious leans on the actions of those around to determine what the next step should be. If everybody is running, then run. If everybody is frozen, then freeze. And if somebody is stepping in to help, then several people will step in to help.
This is called the bystander effect and examples periodically show up in the press where it’s reported that a crowd failed to step in and help someone in distress. (After an investigation, its often found that many of the most shocking stories were exaggerations by alarmed eye witnesses).
Knowing this phenomena exists can help you should you ever be a victim and witnesses aren’t seeming to step in. Should this happen, look at an individual and ask that individual for help. This breaks the subconscious response in the witness and forces a conscious response. Others watching, will then join in to help. It’s advised that women who are being manhandled by a stranger should shout out that they don’t know this person and yell that they are being attacked. Again, that breaks the subconscious processing and engages conscious processing of the event by witnesses.
Social Proof
This is conscious decision to look to those around you to determine if your behavior is socially acceptable. It might be in regards to your choice of clothing for an event or whether your dog is allowed in a place you want to go.
When a person is in a situation where they are unsure of the correct way to behave, they will often look to others for clues concerning the correct behavior. When "we conform because we believe that others' interpretation of an ambiguous situation is more accurate than ours and will help us choose an appropriate course of action".
** In some definitions, social proof is used interchangeably with informational social influence. Because some sources don’t use the terms synonymously, I’ve chosen to follow suit. Many of the terms used in this article have overlapping uses, especially with non-academic sources. This is a function of our sloppy language, what matters is understanding the behavior, not the terminology.
Conformity
“For an individual joining a group, copying the behaviour of the majority would then be a sensible, adaptive behaviour. A conformist tendency would facilitate acceptance into the group and would probably lead to survival if it involved the decision, for instance, to choose between a nutritious or poisonous food, based on copying the behaviour of the majority.”
~ Julie C. Coultas ~
There is a natural predisposition to conforming to the actions and beliefs of those around you. This is an evolutionary trait which evolved from the need to stay in the good graces of your tribe in order to be seen as a reliable ally. This is natural behavior within a tribe, but even around strangers there is a tendency to try to fit in, even if it means disguising part of who you are. This is why rallies, campaign events, and company events are created — to generate a common purpose.
Peer influence (Normative Social Influence)
To maintain group cohesion, our peer groups will encourage, if not enforce, conformity. We are also wired to outcompete our peers…
The researchers found that the striatum, a part of the brain associated with rewards, showed higher activity when a participant beat a peer in the lottery, as opposed to when the participant won while alone.
The medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain associated with social reasoning, was more activated as well. …
"These findings suggest that the brain is equipped with the ability to detect and encode social signals, make social signals salient, and then, use these signals to optimize future behavior," Coricelli said. …
In group environments, on the other hand, rewards tend to be winner-takes-all.
Nowhere is this more clear than in sexual competition, where -- to borrow a phrase from racing legend Dale Earnhardt, Sr. -- second place is just first loser.
We are most familiar with the influence of peer pressure on teenagers. The research indicates that we are all encounter peer pressure but teenagers, who are undergoing significant changes in the brain, are more susceptible to giving in to that pressure. As adults, we hear it as “stay for one more drink” and “lets have dessert”, but peer influence also encourages us to get out of bad relationships, to exercise together, and to participate in positive social activities. Peer pressure can come from friends and family that want the best for you and from those who want company for something they shouldn’t be doing.
Collective identity
“There was something else my mother did that I've always remembered: "Always look for the helpers," she'd tell me. "There's always someone who is trying to help." I did, and I came to see that the world is full of doctors and nurses, police and firemen, volunteers, neighbors and friends who are ready to jump in to help when things go wrong.“
~ Fred Rogers ~
When a group gathers together for a common purpose, they create a collective identity. This term can be used very broadly, but a specific example is when a group gathers to respond to a disaster. Without government instruction, groups of citizens band together to provide relief and save those at risk. These bottom up citizen initiatives (BUIs) flow to where the need is and interoperate surprisingly well without formal supervision. They use the collective knowledge to acquire needed resources and use the collective actions to guide what needs to be done next. We’ve seen this with people being removed from rubble or rescued by boat from a flood. Others will setup kitchens or provide water and shelter. The actions of the group guide the actions of the individuals.
Local people are important actors in urban disaster response. When a disaster strikes, the immediate response – search and rescue; dealing with the injured, the traumatized and the homeless – is carried out mostly by family members, friends and neighbours. It might be many hours or even days before professional emergency teams arrive, depending on the location of the disaster, the extent of physical disruption to transport and communications, and the capacity of official organizations to respond. …
The diversity of activities and constellations observed in our screening speaks to the flexibility of BUIs as an additional instrument of flood risk governance. BUIs seem remarkably agile in terms of their duration and scope, particularly if they are self‐organised groups active in the preparedness, response and recovery stages: they can be established quickly, maintained for a limited period, and disbanded as soon as their mission is accomplished. They can easily reorient their agenda if local needs shift or previously silent population segments raise their voices. They are unconstrained by the legal and administrative rulesets with which governmental authorities have to comply.
The broader, and more common, use of collective identity, refers to social movements and also center around a central purpose. They are often planned or created over time, and they tend to operate more like tribes, which you can read more about here.
Groupthink
In a crowd men always tend to the same level, and, on general questions, a vote, recorded by forty academicians is no better than that of forty water-carriers.”
~ Gustave Le Bon ~
The bane of organizations is groupthink — where individuals suppress their opinions and join what they believe to be the group’s opinion. This leads to bad decision making as fewer alternatives are considered and potential problems can go undiscussed.
Groupthink describes a particular group dynamics leading to a decision-making pathology. Occurring under widely observed conditions, groupthink can lead to a degradation of decision making whereby group members sacrifice their independence in favor of herding behavior. A minority, often of one, becomes the decision maker often with impetuosity and unwarranted rectitude. A variety of groupthink symptoms could lead to overestimation of the group’s power and morality, pressures toward uniformity of viewpoint and closed-mindedness.
The antidote to groupthink is to foster an environment where polite disagreement is encouraged, even rewarded, and where an authority figure does not dominate the conversation.
FOMO, the fear of missing out
“It is in man’s nature to be drawn by the crowd, if only to see what everybody else is up to. Even when that crowd was composed entirely of albino snow monkeys…”
~ Mat Johnson ~
You’ve experienced this if you’ve ever seen a line, joined it, and then asked others in the line what they were queueing for. The subconscious brain triggers a desire to enter the line because it assumes there is a rare and valuable resource to be had; an artifact of millennia where scavenging for resources was necessary for survival. You may have also noticed that during an extreme weather event or pandemic that the sight of someone carrying an unnecessarily large amount of an item out of a store triggers others to do the same, regardless of need.
Red sneakers effect
In many ways we are wired to fit in with those around us. So when someone purposefully stands out due to dress or manner, we assume that person has a higher status or higher competence. The term red sneakers effect refers to someone who wears red sneakers in a room full of professionally dressed individuals. The individuals in that room will give more weight to what that person has to say.
In the present research, we propose that under certain conditions, nonconforming behaviors can be more beneficial than efforts to conform and can signal higher status and competence to others. We argue that while unintentional violations of normative codes and etiquette can indeed result in negative inferences and attributions, when the deviant behavior appears to be deliberate, it can lead to higher rather than lower status and competence inferences.
Social loafing
This may not seem obvious at first, but you’ve likely experienced this with work crews and in large organizations. As a work group expands, the individual’s effort becomes less impactful, so there is a tendency to not work as hard when there are many people working toward the same task. This is one reason why larger organizations tend to be less efficient. This effect also helps explain why recognizing individual effort can increase productivity.
Social loafing describes the tendency of individuals to put forth less effort when they are part of a group. Because all group members are pooling their efforts to achieve a common goal, each member contributes less than they would if they were individually responsible.
The Madness of the crowds
“The mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread.”
~ B.F. Skinner ~
This pattern of being affected by those around us gets amplified when the crowd gets bigger and powerful emotions, such as anger, take hold. The crowd becomes a mob and the mob can start becoming destructive. When this happens, individuals in the crowd get swept up in behaviors they normally wouldn’t condone. It’s a powerful experience which some seek out; visiting protests with weapons and tools of destruction. These individuals will seek out other like-minded individuals and try to stir up similar behavior from those around them.
It was this crowd psychology that drove the “lynching parties” in America’s past. It’s what drives the scrums over store sales on Black Friday. It’s what drove the mass killings between the Hutus and Tutsis in Rawanda. And it’s what drove much of the killing in China’s cultural revolution.
Here are a few reasons why this phenomena occurs:
Deindividuation
Individuals can lose a sense of themselves when in a crowd and the crowd’s emotions escalate. The prefrontal cortex of the brain, which handles decision making, impulse control, empathy, and emotional regulation, becomes less active. This loosened conscious control over the limbic system creates an environment where actions are detached from perceived consequences.
Deindividuation is a state in which you become so immersed in the norms of the group that you lose your sense of identity and personal responsibility. An individual relinquishes individual responsibility for actions and sees behavior as a consequence of group norms and expectations.
Dehumanization
“ʺThey are all the same!ʺ Is the cruelest gallows humankind ever built. - On Stereotypes and Sweeping Statements”
~ Lamine Pearlheart ~
With the prefrontal cortex not in control, most empathy is gone and the humanity of others gets lost. People are no longer perceived as human but as objects. Extreme physical actions such as trampling, shooting, stabbing, clubbing, or torching them have the same empathetic impact as doing the same to a cardboard box.
Dehumanization is intimately bound up with the worst atrocities that human beings have perpetrated against one another. It haunts the episodes of genocide, war, and racial oppression that deface our history. …
[D]ehumanization has the function of disabling inhibitions against violence. There’s an important reason why we need dehumanization (and also other methods) to help us do terrible things to one another.
Emotional contagion
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
~ Gustave Le Bon ~
Crowds have a shared emotional response. We enjoy this experience when attending movies, concerts, and comedy shows. This shared response turns dark when the crowd’s emotions turn to anger and vengeance. These are our most powerful emotions and when the prefrontal cortex isn’t in control, violence becomes possible.
Emotional contagion occurs when one person responds to the stimuli they feel when seeing another person’s emotions. Early studies found that emotional contagion occurred unconsciously, as a copied behavior based on what someone was observing.
Diffusion of responsibility
“The violence of the feelings of crowds is also increased, especially in heterogeneous crowds, by the absence of all sense of responsibility.”
~ Gustave Le Bon ~
If you were to break a window, then you would bear the full emotional responsibility for the action. If you’re one of a thousand people breaking windows then your brain calculates your responsibility as 1/1000th of the total. This reduces your perceived consequences and is one of the reasons why larger mobs become more dangerous.
[B]eing part of a group creates the perception that violent or unacceptable behavior is not a personal responsibility but a group one.
Anonymity
A person who would never think of throwing a bottle at another, might do so while hidden in a crowd of thousands. When we are perceived as being anonymous, we feel freer to breaking social conventions. This gets played out on the internet all the time. In times of social upheaval, we’ll see those in both sides of a conflict wearing masks (whether for concealment or protection). This gives the mask wearing psychological permission to be violent. The wearing of the mask also makes the wearer seem less human to others, increasing the chance of being attacked.
Some of the apparent causes of mob mentality are well understood. Anonymity is one: Yankee fans can disappear into a blur of blue pinstripes. "I have never been called names like that in my entire life," says Cikara of her New York visit. (She has completed post-doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge.) When people feel they will not be recognized or called to answer for their actions, they are more likely to behave wantonly.
Conformity
“When you're just like everybody else, you've nothing to offer other than your conformity.”
~ Wayne Dyer ~
As mentioned earlier, we tend to conform to the behaviors and actions of those around us. Just as we are more likely to stand peacefully in line if all those around us are, we are also more likely to mimic the actions of those around us when in a mob.
Participants’ attitude became more prosocial or antisocial when they learned about the choices of an extremely prosocial or antisocial agent, regardless of whether the agent was a group of people, one person, or a computer. …
By learning to predict the agent’s behaviour, participants deduce how salient following the norm is for others, and change their behaviour to be more consistent with them.
Informational influence
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
~ Charles MacKay ~
When a mob starts rushing for the door, rushing into a building, or fleeing down a street, most of the crowd often doesn’t know what caused the movement; but each member decides that the others must know why and they join in the action. This herding instinct is not much different to what happens with herds of animals on the Serengeti. It’s an instinctual behavior.
“A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal, which is the reason why the ethical attitude of large organizations is always doubtful. The psychology of a large crowd inevitably sinks to the level of mob psychology. If, therefore, I have a so-called collective experience as a member of a group, it takes place on a lower level of consciousness than if I had the experience by myself alone.”
― C.G. Jung
Putting this all together
Our instincts cause us to be influenced by those around us. This has been a distinct evolutionary advantage as it facilitated our ancestors working together as a cohesive unit when under threat or when the circumstances were uncertain. In calm circumstances these oxytocin-driven experiences can bring great enjoyment and help bond together a group of people in a crisis. But in moments when the crowds are large and powerful negative emotions dominate, the single-mindedness of a mob can override the brain’s ability to control impulses, control emotions, and to weigh the risks of a given action. By recognizing the forces at play in these moments, we can take steps to maintain our safety and minimize future risks.
Exercises
To be done in a non-distracting environment.
Think of a time when you went along with the group despite having a different opinion. Identify the factors that influenced you.
Think of a social event where the mood of those around you influenced your enjoyment of the evening.
Finale
This is the fourth foundational essay for this newsletter. Last week we covered the importance of tribes in our lives and how they influence us. The next foundational essay will discuss how our brains adapt to decision making in uncertainty. There is remarkably little research on this, despite its enormous impact on society and on us as individuals.
Thank you for visiting today. Your readership is greatly appreciated and valued. If you found this newsletter interesting please recommend this newsletter to your friends and family. Have a great week!
Your friend,
DJ