Herd mentality, mob mentality or pack mentality describes how people can be influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviors on a largely emotional, rather than

rational Rationality is the quality of being guided by or based on reasons. In this regard, a person acts rationally if they have a good reason for what they do or a belief is rational if it is based on strong evidence. This quality can apply to an abili ...

, basis. When individuals are affected by mob mentality, they may make different decisions than they would have individually. Social psychologists study the related topics of

group intelligence A group is a number of persons or things that are located, gathered, or classed together. Groups of people * Cultural group, a group whose members share the same cultural identity * Ethnic group, a group whose members share the same ethnic iden ...

crowd wisdom The wisdom of the crowd is the collective opinion of a diverse independent group of individuals rather than that of a single expert. This process, while not new to the Information Age, has been pushed into the mainstream spotlight by social infor ...

, groupthink, and deindividuation.

History

The idea of a " group mind" or " mob behavior" was first put forward by 19th-century social psychologists

Gabriel Tarde Gabriel Tarde (; in full Jean-Gabriel De Tarde; 12 March 1843 – 13 May 1904) was a French sociologist, criminologist and social psychologist who conceived sociology as based on small psychological interactions among individuals (much as i ...

and Gustave Le Bon. Herd behavior in human societies has also been studied by Sigmund Freud and Wilfred Trotter, whose book '' Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War'' is a classic in the field of social psychology. 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 Consumer behavior is the study of individuals, groups, or organizations and all the activities associated with the purchase, use and disposal of goods and services. Consumer behaviour consists of how the consumer's emotions, attitudes, and ...

. More recently,

Malcolm Gladwell Malcolm Timothy Gladwell (born 3 September 1963) is an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for ''The New Yorker'' since 1996. He has published seven books: '' The Tipping Point: How Little T ...

in '' The Tipping Point'', examines how cultural, social, and economic factors converge to create trends in consumer behavior. In 2004, the ''

New Yorker New Yorker or ''variant'' primarily refers to: * A resident of the State of New York ** Demographics of New York (state) * A resident of New York City ** List of people from New York City * ''The New Yorker'', a magazine founded in 1925 * ''The Ne ...

'' financial columnist James Surowiecki published '' The Wisdom of Crowds''. Twenty-first-century academic fields such as marketing and behavioral finance attempt to identify and predict the rational and irrational behavior of investors. (See the work of

Daniel Kahneman Daniel Kahneman (; he, דניאל כהנמן; born March 5, 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist and economist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was award ...

, Robert Shiller, Vernon L. Smith, and

Amos Tversky Amos Nathan Tversky ( he, עמוס טברסקי; March 16, 1937 – June 2, 1996) was an Israeli cognitive and mathematical psychologist and a key figure in the discovery of systematic human cognitive bias and handling of risk. Much of his ...

.) Driven by emotional reactions such as

greed and fear Greed and fear refer to two opposing emotional states theorized as factors causing the unpredictability and volatility of the stock market, and irrational market behavior inconsistent with the efficient-market hypothesis. Greed and fear relate ...

, investors can be seen to join in frantic purchasing and sales of stocks, creating bubbles and crashes. As a result, herd behavior is closely studied by behavioral finance experts in order to help predict future economic crises.

Research

The

Asch conformity experiments In psychology, the Asch conformity experiments or the Asch paradigm were a series of studies directed by Solomon Asch studying if and how individuals yielded to or defied a majority group and the effect of such influences on beliefs and opinions. ...

(1951) involved a series of studies directed by American Psychologist

Solomon Asch Solomon Eliot Asch (September 14, 1907 – February 20, 1996) was a Polish- American Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology. He created seminal pieces of work in impression formation, prestige suggestion, conformity, and many oth ...

that measured the effects of majority group belief and opinion on individuals. Fifty male students from Swarthmore College participated in a vision test with a line judgement task. A naive participant was put in a room with seven confederates (i.e. actors) who had agreed in advance to match their responses. The participant was not aware of this and was told that the actors were also naive participants. There was one control condition with no confederates. Confederates purposefully gave the wrong answer on 12 trials. The other participant usually went with the group and said the wrong answer. Through 18 trials total, Asch (1951) found that one third (33%) of naive participants conformed with the clearly incorrect majority, with 75% of participants over the 12 trials. Fewer than 1% of participants gave the wrong answer when there were no confederates. 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. A select few were then given more detailed instructions on where to walk. The scientists discovered that people end up blindly following one or two instructed people who appear to know where they are going. The results of this experiment showed that it only takes 5% of confident looking and instructed people to influence the direction of the other 95% of people in the crowd, and the 200 volunteers did this without even realizing it. Researchers from Hebrew University, NYU, and

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

explored herd mentality in online spaces, specifically in the context of "digitized, aggregated opinions." Online comments were given an initial positive or negative vote (up or down) on an undisclosed website over five months. The control group comments were left alone. The researchers found that "the first person reading the comment was 32% more likely to upvote it if it had been already given a fake positive score." Over the five months, comments artificially rated positively showed a 25% higher average score than the control group, with the initial negative vote ending up with no statistical significance in comparison to the control group. The researchers found that "prior ratings created significant bias in individual rating behavior, and positive and negative social influences created asymmetric herding effects." "That is a significant change," Dr. Aral, one of the researchers involved in the experiment, stated. "We saw how these very small signals of social influence snowballed into behaviors like herding."

References

External links

* The Wisdom of Crowds an
Iowa Electronic Market Statistics
{{DEFAULTSORT:Herd Mentality Figures of speech Social psychology Group processes zh-yue:羊群效應

History

Research

See also

References

Further reading

External links