Herd Mentality: Where Does It End?
It is impossible for humans to live in societies and not fall under the influence of their community. But where do we draw the line on our behaviour and how it affects other people?
If you have followed me on Twitter for a little over a year, you must have seen this tweet or at least a variation of it (I recycle it often):
We live in echo chambers and we are surrounded by people who are likely to repeat our beliefs back to us. As part of this ‘herd’ of people, we often find ourselves suspending our ‘selves’ to identify with herds and in turn, it becomes difficult to tell which came first; the herd, or the individual.
Herd mentality, like a lot of other psychological dispositions, branches out and covers so many other aspects of our psychological commute and it is too important to ignore. For instance, look at this tweet:
You most likely saw the tweet and the videos posted on the thread. But there’s a follow-up:
The original tweet’s “that’s” was read as “what’s” and in our case, it did give us entertainment. In other cases where the herd has misread a situation, nasty things have happened. Herd mentality could lead to criminal activities like jungle justice.
Herding branches into several psychological biases but the engine that propelled the mass hysteria on that particular tweet is that once the herd agreed to “what’s”, many people stopped questioning and just went with that.
In research led by the University of Exeter, it was revealed that individuals have evolved to be overly influenced by their neighbours, rather than rely on their own instinct. As a result, groups become less responsive to changes in their natural environment.
The researchers noted that “copying what other individuals do can be useful in many situations, such as what kind of phone to buy, or for animals, which way to move or whether a situation is dangerous. However, the challenge is in evaluating personal beliefs when they contradict what others are doing. We showed that evolution will lead individuals to overuse social information, and copy others too much than they should. The result is that groups evolve to be unresponsive to changes in their environment and spend too much time copying one another, and not making their own decisions."
I have written in the past about why leaving the herd can be useful to us but the bigger problem is that recognising we are being herded can be incredibly difficult. While this might not be heaven, I have found something that has helped me.
Question, Curate, Listen
One of the social media platforms I utilise the most for learning new things is YouTube. YouTube, like several other platforms, builds on your data across Google services and elsewhere to recommend things to you that will most likely confirm your biases. However, occasionally, I clear my YouTube data and look for new information.
Usually, I clear this data when I feel like I am beginning to feel too immersed or act in a type of way that is suggestive of consuming too much of the same type of information. So, I start to question what might be on the other side. I have had periods where I only consumed conservative media. I have had a libertarian consumption fest. And I have had liberal feasts.
By questioning the herd which I am in, I exit one herd and while I do find myself getting immersed into other herds, I am no longer only a product of information from one group of people. This, therefore, means that if someone from herd A is angry at someone from herd B, I am in a position to understand both herds and not be influenced by just one of them.
To avoid being controlled by herds, you must curate herds. Quite an irony of fate, a catch-22, but it is your ball to play.
TEA
Thank you for your responses to last week’s NAN. I will start to actively consider and passively work on editing and collating all of this year’s NAN in one document.
During the week, a NAN reader reached out to me and asked that I should start leaving recommendations (of documentaries and podcasts that I listen to) on every NAN. It may not be as consistent as NAN itself but I will attempt to share some of what I’m consuming here.
At the moment, I am on the final episode of Wild Wild Country (Netflix, 2018), a documentary series about a religious leader who operated a religious ‘city’ out of Oregon in the USA. For podcasters, you will enjoy The Drop-out. It’s about Elizabeth Holmes, who promised to give the world medical magic but as we all know (hmm, do we all know?) magic does not exist.
Or does it?
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Be nice to other people, smile as much as you can, and live freely. Have a great week.
Feature image credit: The Milli Chronicle
Thank you for sharing. I liked the part of clearing the YT data so you don't end up just consuming the same thing. A good morning read.
Beautiful insight, as usual.
While it's hard to recognize when we're only conforming to herd mentality, I think it's much more harder for most individuals to recognize their own 'self' (beliefs, ideologies) and leave the herd. The reason is, we're sociologically wired to seek group approval, so leaving a herd may sometimes, lead to being an outcast, a social pariah, and that's one sacrifice many are not willing to make.