Herd mentality is the tendency for people’s behavior or beliefs to
conform to those of the group they belong to. The concept of herd mentality has been studied and analyzed from different perspectives, including biology, psychology and sociology. This psychological phenomenon can have profound impacts on human behavior.
Social psychologists study the related topics of
collective intelligence,
crowd wisdom,
groupthink, and
deindividuation.
History
The idea of a "group mind" or "
mob behavior" was first put forward by 19th-century social psychologists
Gabriel Tarde and
Gustave Le Bon. Herd behavior in human societies has also been studied by
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud ( ; ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies seen as originating fro ...
and
Wilfred Trotter
Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter, FRS (3 November 1872 – 25 November 1939) was an English surgeon, a pioneer in neurosurgery. He was also known for his studies on social psychology, most notably for his concept of the herd instinct, which he f ...
, 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 behaviour is the study of individuals, groups, or organisations and all activities associated with the purchase, use and disposal of goods and services. It encompasses how the consumer's emotions, attitudes, and preferences affe ...
. More recently,
Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell (born 3 September 1963) is a Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for ''The New Yorker'' since 1996. He has published eight books. He is also the host of the podcast ''Revisionist ...
in ''
The Tipping Point'', examines how cultural, social, and economic factors converge to create trends in consumer behavior. In 2004, the ''
New Yorker'' 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 (; ; March 5, 1934 – March 27, 2024) was an Israeli-American psychologist best known for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memor ...
,
Robert Shiller,
Vernon L. Smith, and
Amos Tversky
Amos Nathan Tversky (; 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 early work concerned th ...
.) 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. 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 were, or the Asch paradigm was, a series of studies directed by Solomon Asch studying if and how individuals yielded to or defied a majority (sociology), majority group and the effect of such influenc ...
(1951) involved a series of studies directed by American Psychologist
Solomon Asch
Solomon Eliot Asch (September 14, 1907 – February 20, 1996) was a Polish people, Polish-United States of America, American Gestalt psychology, Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology. He created seminal pieces of work in impressi ...
that measured the effects of majority group belief and opinion on individuals. Fifty male students from
Swarthmore College
Swarthmore College ( , ) is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, United States. Founded in 1864, with its first classes held in 1869, Swarthmore is one of the e ...
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 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."
Theories
Evolution
Evidence of herding in animals, especially monkeys, humankind’s closest relatives suggests that herd mentality has evolutionary roots. 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. For instance, imitation in monkeys is the most effective strategy of rapidly transmitting information throughout the species. Accumulating evidence and statistical hypotheses framework developed using a Markov chain approach has shown that the joint exploitation of one source will give more benefit to the group than an even distribution of effort over two different sources. 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.
Social scientists have regarded this as an important evolutionary instinct which encourages socially constructive empathy and altruism, helpful in overcoming conflict.
The advantages conferred to herd behavior has led to it shaping human evolution, consistent with
Darwin’s theory of
natural selection
Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the Heredity, heritable traits characteristic of a population over generation ...
.
Neuroscience
Herd behavior can also be illuminated by neuroscience. Recent developments in neuroscience suggest that our tendency to ‘imitate’ might be due to a system of ‘mirror neurons’ in our brains. In an experiment that recorded electrical activity in the brain of a macaque, it was found that the same neurons fired both when the monkey acted and when the monkey observed the same action performed by the other.
The neuron ‘mirrored’ the motor behavior of the other, as though the observer was executing the motor act. 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.
Another neuroscientific phenomenon which results in the primitive, automatic and unconscious process of social mimicry is emotional contagion. When a receiver of information interacts with its sender, the receiver perceives the emotional expressions of the sender and automatically transfers the emotional expressions to his/her bodily expressions. Through the process of afferent feedback, the copied bodily expressions result in the receiver experiencing the same emotions as the sender. This leads to an emotional convergence and mimicry behavior. This theory is reinforced by a study that has shown that herd-decisions are associated with shorter decision-making times, suggesting that herding is an intrinsic, emotional response and a more automatic decision-making heuristic.
Neuroscientific analysis of economic games suggests that social rewards trigger a ‘bliss response’, through the release of the neurochemical, oxytocin. Importantly, activations are pronounced where cooperation is reciprocated. This creates a positive feedback loop, where the brain triggers social behavior to release a ‘bliss response’.
Psychology
‘Docility’, or receptivity to social norms is a fundamental characteristic that underlies herd behavior.
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. The Asch experiment where subjects conformed to the erroneous majority view, has shown that the human mind is built to be receptive to social norms and self-censor actions in advance to avoid deviations from the norm.
‘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.
Experimental evidence has shown that there exists a correlation between risk aversion and herding behavior.
People tend to avoid risk and conform to the status quo as they believe that others’ information is more reliable and strength in numbers minimizes uncertainties. For instance, consumers on online platforms perceive popular products as the ones with superior quality.
Sociology
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. Imitating behavior of a social group to learn falls under the former as it relies on observations of others as opposed to individual experience. This provides a ‘fast and frugal heuristic approach to learning’ in social situations and a path of least resistance, which humans gravitate towards.
Additionally, in a world where social perception is an inherent determinant of social status, it seems rational to submit to majority pressure. The desire to strongly identify with the group could thus spur people to abandon their own judgements and imitate the actions of others within the group.
In modern society
While in some situations, adopting the herd mentality can be a beneficial survival strategy, herd behavior has not been well-adapted for modern ‘artificial’ contexts and can lead to negative consequences.
Trading in financial markets is characterized by herd behavior to a large extent. In times of market uncertainty, fear response drives investors to imitate what other investors are doing without conducting their own analysis to mitigate the risk of failure. Economist
Keynes states that ‘worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally’. Unjustified runs on foreign exchange currencies and stock market bubbles are usually attributable to herding behavior. At other times, individuals benefit from the ‘information cascade’ by herding to piece together incomplete information about the market. Nonetheless, the arbitrary nature of decision-making in the financial markets based on herding can generate large-scale instability.
Herd mentality can be harnessed as a useful tool in marketing (i.e. influencers and reviews) as studies have found that shoppers are more inclined to purchase a product when their attitude is framed by others’ influence and that herd mentality becomes more apparent as the group size grows.
Nonetheless, herd behavior on social media can also create dangerous echo chambers and lead to the polarization of society. 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. Where members of a societal group adopt homogenous opinions, it amplifies the group’s collective beliefs and might result in the marginalization of minority viewpoints and a potential for group members to prioritize consensus over rational decision-making (known as ‘group think’).
See also
*
Anonymity
Anonymity describes situations where the acting person's identity is unknown. Anonymity may be created unintentionally through the loss of identifying information due to the passage of time or a destructive event, or intentionally if a person cho ...
*
Anxiety
Anxiety is an emotion characterised by an unpleasant state of inner wikt:turmoil, turmoil and includes feelings of dread over Anticipation, anticipated events. Anxiety is different from fear in that fear is defined as the emotional response ...
*
Argumentum ad populum
*
Bandwagon effect
*
Cancel culture
*
Collective intelligence
*
Conformity
Conformity or conformism is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to social group, group norms, politics or being like-minded. Social norm, Norms are implicit, specific rules, guidance shared by a group of individuals, that guide t ...
*
Critical mass (sociodynamics)
*
Crowd abuse
*
Crowd psychology
Crowd psychology (or mob psychology) is a subfield of social psychology which examines how the psychology of a group of people differs from the psychology of any one person within the group. The study of crowd psychology looks into the actions ...
*
Decentralized decision making
*
Delphi method
*
Doomscrolling
*
Early adopter
* ''
Folie à deux''
*
Freethought
Freethought (sometimes spelled free thought) is an unorthodox attitude or belief.
A freethinker holds that beliefs should not be formed on the basis of authority, tradition, revelation, or dogma, and should instead be reached by other meth ...
*
Fear
Fear is an unpleasant emotion that arises in response to perception, perceived dangers or threats. Fear causes physiological and psychological changes. It may produce behavioral reactions such as mounting an aggressive response or fleeing the ...
*
Groupthink
*
Herd behavior
*
Information cascade
*
List of most-disliked YouTube videos
*
Manipulation (psychology)
*
Mass psychogenic illness (mass hysteria)
*
Monkey see, monkey do
*
NPC (meme)
*
Opinion leadership
Opinion leadership is leadership by an active media user who interprets the meaning of media messages or content for lower-end media users. Typically opinion leaders are held in high esteem by those who accept their opinions. Opinion leadership com ...
*
Peer pressure
Peer pressure is a direct or indirect influence on peers, i.e., members of social groups with similar interests and experiences, or social statuses. Members of a peer group are more likely to influence a person's beliefs, values, religion and beh ...
*
Predictive market
*
Riot
A riot or mob violence is a form of civil disorder commonly characterized by a group lashing out in a violent public disturbance against authority, property, or people.
Riots typically involve destruction of property, public or private. The p ...
*
Sheeple
*
Social network
A social network is a social structure consisting of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), networks of Dyad (sociology), dyadic ties, and other Social relation, social interactions between actors. The social network per ...
*
Slave morality
*
The Emperor's New Clothes
* ''
The Wisdom of Crowds''
*
Trial by media
;Philosophers
*
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard ( , ; ; 5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a Danes, Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical tex ...
*
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher. He began his career as a classical philology, classical philologist, turning to philosophy early in his academic career. In 1869, aged 24, Nietzsche bec ...
*
José Ortega y Gasset
*
Everett Dean Martin
References
Further reading
* Bloom, Howard, ''The Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century''. (2000) John Wiley & Sons, New York.
* Freud, Sigmund's ''Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse'' (1921; English translation ''
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
''Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego'' () is a 1921 book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis.
In this monograph, Freud describes psychological mechanisms at work within mass movements. A ''mass'', according to Freud, is ...
'', *1922). Reprinted 1959 Liveright, New York.
* Gladwell, Malcolm, ''The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference''. (2002) Little, Brown & Co., Boston.
* Le Bon, Gustav, ''Les Lois psychologiques de l'évolution des peuples''. (1894)
National Library of France, Paris.
* Le Bon, Gustave, ''The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind''. (1895) Project Gutenberg.
* Martin, Everett Dean, ''The Behavior of Crowds'' (1920).
* McPhail, Clark. The Myth of the Madding Crowd (1991) Aldine-DeGruyter.
* Trotter, Wilfred, ''Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War''. (1915) Macmillan, New York.
* Suroweicki, James: ''The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, *Societies and Nations''. (2004) Little, Brown, Boston.
* Sunstein, Cass, ''Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge''. (2006) Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom.
External links
*
The Wisdom of Crowds an
Iowa Electronic Market Statistics
zh-yue:羊群效應
{{DEFAULTSORT:Herd Mentality
Figures of speech
Social psychology
Group processes