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

emotional Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is currently no scientific consensus on a definition. ...

, rather than rational, 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, crowd wisdom,

groupthink Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Cohesiveness, or the desire for cohesivenes ...

, and

deindividuation Deindividuation is a concept in social psychology that is generally thought of as the loss of self-awareness in groups, although this is a matter of contention (see below). For the social psychologist, the level of analysis is the individual in ...

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 Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon (; 7 May 1841 – 13 December 1931) was a leading French polymath whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics. He is best known for his 1895 work '' The Crowd ...

. 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 explained as originatin ...

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. 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 ...

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 (; 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 awarde ...

, Robert Shiller, Vernon L. Smith, and Amos Tversky.) 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 Bubble, Bubbles or The Bubble may refer to: Common uses * Bubble (physics), a globule of one substance in another, usually gas in a liquid ** Soap bubble * Economic bubble, a situation where asset prices are much higher than underlying fundame ...

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 (1951) involved a series of studies directed by American Psychologist Solomon Asch that measured the effects of majority group belief and opinion on individuals. Fifty male students from

Swarthmore College Swarthmore College ( , ) is a private liberal arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1864, with its first classes held in 1869, Swarthmore is one of the earliest coeducational colleges in the United States. It was established as ...

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 , mottoeng = And knowledge will be increased , established = 1831 – Leeds School of Medicine1874 – Yorkshire College of Science1884 - Yorkshire College1887 – affiliated to the federal Victoria University1904 – University of Leeds , ...

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 The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI; he, הַאוּנִיבֶרְסִיטָה הַעִבְרִית בִּירוּשָׁלַיִם) is a public university, public research university based in Jerusalem, Israel. Co-founded by Albert Einstein ...

, 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."

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