The herd mentality: we tell each other not to vote
Joe Wright, 16 July 2014
Think Like a Freak is simply an amazing book. If you haven’t read it: read it. Their way of thinking is infectious. The book itself is a candid and sharp analysis of the way humans behave, not how we think we behave, with fascinating evidence to prove it on every page. (If you think it’s rubbish, probably best to click ‘close’ now).
A particular section that stood out was one on herd mentality – how humans will act simply in accordance with others around them. Herd mentality is well known to all of us, such as peer pressure at school, but what the authors show is it runs far deeper, has an almost constant effect and rarely has the result we would expect. One of the best examples includes (annoyingly I don’t have the book with me to share specifics) warning signs. In a bid to stop people stealing petrified wood from Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, the groundskeepers put up signs telling residents how widespread it had become and the damage it was causing. The result: more wood was taken. The message the sign actually gave was ‘lots of people do this’, giving others permission to behave similarly. Worse, it made people greedy by implying the wood might all be gone soon. (The authors explain far better here)
This simple understanding of human nature – just how much we are sensitive to the behaviour of others – has also been applied to other walks of life. On a local election day in the US in 2010, Facebook installed banners in users’ feeds reminding them to vote. They also offered people the opportunity to share with friends that they had just been out and voted – though not who they had voted for. After clicking the ‘I voted’ button a thumbnail of their face appeared in friends’ streams with the phrase ‘*name* just voted’ – accompanied by banners of other friends who had done the same.
The feature didn’t have a huge uptake at the time, and some users simply lied when they said they had voted, but the effect was comparatively significant. According to the New Statesman, ‘The researchers concluded that their Facebook graphic directly mobilised 60,000 voters, and, thanks to the ripple effect, ultimately caused an additional 340,000 votes to be cast that day. As they point out, George W Bush won Florida, and thus the presidency, by 537 votes – fewer than 0.01 per cent of the votes cast in that state.’
Behavioural economics is a topic of growing interest to politicians (another good example here) – the Government already has its own Nudge Unit – but it obviously raises all sorts of moral questions. For example, is Facebook ‘influencing elections?
At the same time we already live with all kinds of nudges from advertises, and yes, newspapers. During the European elections, we all expected a low voter turnout. Not a single journalist said, nor dared say, otherwise. The message conveyed was ‘don’t bother voting, no one else is’. Disaffection with politics is self-perpetuating and we are all complicit. The challenge for governments – but more importantly, journalists too – is to make sure voting doesn’t become black sheep behaviour, especially among young voters.
Human beings are susceptible to manipulation by general opinion, but it is important to understand that what may seem to be cause and effect is often just a correlation. For example, the low polling in the European elections may have been simply a natural and embedded consequence of general voter apathy because the electors could not see any value in voting when the whole European political process seemed so far removed from their lives and all the major parties had essentially the same EU policy .
But there may also have been something much less conscious and deeper occurring. Man is constrained by sociological laws of which he is only dimly aware. When a general election is held in Britain Members of Parliament are elected for one of 646 constituencies on the very simple basis of who gets the most votes in the constituency. There is no multiple preference voting, just a single vote for one candidate. As a platform for the study of human behaviour it is splendidly uncluttered.
Because people are voting for an individual it might be thought that the voting pattern throughout the country would vary tremendously because people would be voting on the record of the government and opposition in the previous four or five years, the parties’ stated policies if they form the next government, local interests, how the sitting MP has performed and the perceived quality of the other candidates in the constituency. In fact the voting pattern is always remarkably uniform throughout the country. If the swing from the Government is on average 5% throughout the country, there will be few if any constituencies which show a swing of less than 4% or more than 6%. This uniformity does not vary greatly with the size of turnout.
It is impossible to supply any plausible explanation for this behaviour based on the idea that Man is rational. One could see how a small population might be influenced by peer pressure and word of mouth but not a country of sixty million. Nor is it the consequence of modern mass media because the phenomenon predated television and the Internet. If I had to hazard an explanation it would be this: different personality types are distributed throughout populations in certain proportions as the consequence of natural selection working to ensure that human society functions. Each personality type will tend to behave in the same way. Hence, the aggregate societal effect in response to a particular stimulus will be relatively stable. When people vote in a General Election they produce similar voting effects because the personality types are distributed similarly throughout Britain and consequently people throughout the country respond to circumstances in a similar fashion. In other words, personality traits trump reason.
A less obvious example is the trade cycle. There is no certain explanation for why such a cycle should exist, but it is possible to provide plausible explanations for the ebb and flow of economic activity, for example, that there comes a point in the trade cycle whereby most individuals have purchased everything they want within the constraints of what they can afford and consumption lessens which in turn reduces economic activity which creates a further impetus to reduced consumption as people worry about the future. Equally, it is plausible that when the down side of the cycle has gone on for a while demand increases because goods need replacing and as consumption slowly grows confidence increases triggering further growth.
What is not so easy to provide is a plausible explanation of why the population acts uniformly enough to regularly create such a cycle. How could it be that the large majority of a population routinely respond in the same way? The answer again probably lies in a stable distribution of personality within a population.
What evidence is there for personality being so distributed throughout a population? Well, from our own everyday experience we all know that there is a range of personality types who are met in any reasonably large group, but quantifying such knowledge in an objective manner is to say the least problematical. Whether we have any “objective” statistical evidence at present largely depends how much credence is placed on psychometric tests which supposedly determine personality. Having seen them used to select people for employment I am sceptical of their predictive power, because all too often their assessment of personality fails to match the person‘s performance. More trustworthy although less focused is the information from psychological experiments. Many psychological experiments show personality differences obliquely, for example, the famous experiments of Abrahams in the 1950s on peer pressure and The Stamford prison experiment of the early 1970s. They showed recurrent patterns of obedience and disobedience and of a willingness to abuse and to accept or resist abuse.
Read more http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/reason-is-not-the-primary-driver-of-man/