Herd mentality
The idea of a "group mind" or "mob behavior" was first put forward by 19th-century social psychologists Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon.
Sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class illustrates how individuals imitate other group members of higher social status in their consumer behavior.
More recently, Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point, examines how cultural, social, and economic factors converge to create trends in consumer behavior.
Driven by emotional reactions such as greed and fear, investors can be seen to join in frantic purchasing and sales of stocks, creating bubbles and crashes.
[4] Researchers at Leeds University performed a group experiment in which volunteers were told to randomly walk around a large hall without talking to each other.
[5][6] Researchers from Hebrew University, NYU, and MIT explored herd mentality in online spaces, specifically in the context of "digitized, aggregated opinions.
Evidence shows that animals acquire information to make important decisions (i.e. where to forage and mating potential) by monitoring the interactions of others with their environment.
[11] In humans, evidence suggests that conformity is the product of both informational and normative influences, where the latter refers to receptivity to intra-group social pressures.
[13] The advantages conferred to herd behavior has led to it shaping human evolution, consistent with Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
It is hypothesized that there is a similar ‘mirror neuron’ network that exists in human brains but has yet to be proven because of the ethical considerations surrounding experimentation.
[12] Neuroscientific analysis of economic games suggests that social rewards trigger a ‘bliss response’, through the release of the neurochemical, oxytocin.
[13] Research done on cognitive psychology has shown that humans differ from other species in the development of social norms and mutually shared expectations which inform them about what actions are normal, appropriate or just given any situation.
[3] ‘Docility’ is also created by the human response to narratives and stories, by which most information is conveyed, which influences people to view, interpret and see things from a shared viewpoint.
[22] A study by Katona established that there were two primary methods of group-learning: (1) the ‘stamping-in’ of simple rules-of-thumb and heuristics and (2) learning that occurs via problem solving and understanding.
When people do not challenge the status quo or express dissenting opinions, it might create an echo-chamber environment where a person only encounters information that reflects and reinforces their own.
