'If 50 million people say something foolish, it is still foolish':

Another cognitive error from the Heuristics and Biases....... I of course, had an additional bias as this is a line from Somerset Maugham :)

Social Proof

In the middle of the concert, when the soloist is displaying absolute mastery, someone begins to clap and suddenly the whole room joins in. You do, too.  After the concert, at the door you watch how the people in front of you place a coin on a plate.  You probably leave a tip as well. Why? Social proof.

Social proof  dictates that individuals feel they are behaving correctly when they act the same as other people. In other words, the more people who follow a certain idea, the truer we deem the idea to be. And the more people who display a certain behaviour the more appropriate this behaviour is judged to be by others.

This is, of course, absurd.

A simple experiment carried out in the 1950s by legendary psychologist Solomon Asch shows how peer pressure can warp common sense. A subject is shown a line drawn on paper, and next to it three lines – numbered 1, 2 and 3 – one shorter, one longer and one of the same length as the original one. He or she must indicate which of the three lines corresponds to the original one. If the person is alone in the room, he gives correct answers – unsurprising, because the task is really quite simple. Now five other people enter the room; they are all actors, which the subject does not know. One after another, they give wrong answers, saying ‘number 1’, although it’s very clear that number 3 is the correct answer. Then it is the subject’s turn again. In one third of cases, he will answer incorrectly to match the other people’s responses.

Why do we act like this? Well, in the past, following others was a good survival strategy. Suppose that 50,000 years ago, you were travelling around the Serengeti with your hunter-gatherer friends, and suddenly they all bolted. What would you have done?  You would have sprinted after your friends. 

Those who acted differently from the group – and I am sure there were some – exited the gene pool. We are the direct descendants of those who copied others’ behaviour. This pattern is so deeply rooted in us that we still use it today, even when it offers no survival advantage, which is most of the time. 

Social proof is the evil behind bubbles and stock market panic. It exists in fashion, management techniques, hobbies, religion and diets. It can paralyse whole cultures.

Remember novelist Somerset Maugham’s wise words: ‘If 50 million people say something foolish, it is still foolish.’