Consider the phenomenon of the stampede: one antelope on the
fringe of a herd perceives a predator and runs away, and other join in until
the entire herd is running at top speed.
Most of the herd never saw the predator, but are running because they
trust that there must be some reason that the others are doing so. When one animal tires and stops running, the
herd slows down and comes to a halt.
Again, it is not because they know the threat has passed, but they are
imitating the behavior of others.
And if you think that human beings are different and more
sophisticated, then consider a common prank in which a person stares of into
the distance as if he sees something interesting. Other people stop and stare as well, trying
to see what the original person saw – they did not see it, but are responding
to the original person’s signals. A
group of people gathers, and continue to pause until someone suggests that
there’s nothing there and wanders off, at which point others give up the
attempt to see it – and again, they are reacting to the behavior of the person
rather than to their own perceptions.
For all our pretenses at individuality, human beings are
also social creatures who are prone to the same behavior: reacting to the
actions of others, without evaluating environmental stimuli. The effects of this cannot be
underestimated – but neither can they be overestimated. They apply where purchasing and consumption
are social activities, not when they are individual activities.
Social conformity is often leveraged by advertisers. An advert with a person is generally more
effective than one that shows the product, because the person in the
advertisement serves as a model to be imitated. If the person in the advert is looking at an
item, the tendency of the viewer is to follow their cues and focus their
attention on the same thing the model seems to be looking at. Eye-tracking software confirms that the most
viewed portion of a page is the perceived focal point of the model – people look
to the person first, then look at whatever that person is looking at.
But it goes even further than that: people do not simply tend
to do what others do, but they feel what others feel. If the model in an advertisement seems
excited, the viewers of the advertisement tend to feel excitement as well. If the model appears self-confident when
using the product, people who use the product accept that this is the proper
emotion to feel.
And while emotion can be a gimmick, the same applies to
logic, as best demonstrated by the experiments conducted by Asch. In these experiments, a test subject was
placed in a room with stooges who would intentionally give the wrong answer to
a question (generally comparing the length of two lines). In most instances, the subject will go along
with the answer given by the stooges, even when it is obvious to him that the
answer is wrong. This is not automatic,
but it is significant: at least 75% of volunteers gave incorrect answers when
asked in the company of stooges, whereas only 1% gave an incorrect answer when
they were questioned alone.
So in the end, social influence may be stronger than an
individual’s own inclinations, emotions, and logic. The consume acts a s a puppet, imitating the
puppet whose strings are pulled by the brand.
And in turn, the first imitator becomes a model for the second, the
third, and so on, until the consumers are reduced to the mentality and behavior
of a stampeding herd.
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