Masses of Influence

I’m reading ‘Nudge’ at the moment and it’s full of great thinking on how people make choices and how a variety of factors impact their decision making process. One particularly interesting point is the role of Social Influence – how following what others and the larger crowd think and do affects our own decisions.

I mentioned an experiment by social psychologist Solomon Asch a while ago demonstrating such an effect (here). In this case participants changed their answers to a simple question after finding out others had answered differently (“Which is the longest line”).

A more extreme (and grave) example can be found in Guyana. Facing tax evasion charges in San Francisco in 1978 the founder of the People’s Temple, Reverend Jim Jones, moved one thousand of his followers to a small village in Guyana which he named ‘Jonestown’ (unimaginative really). As the law caught up with him and facing more serious crimes of child abuse Jones prepared vats of poison and decreed that his followers should poison themselves and follow him in committing suicide. Despite some resistance his followers relented and poisoned themselves and their children amidst social pressures opposed on each other. All but two were found dead.

This is a clear example of the mass influencing individual decision, albeit in a rather harrowing way.

A current, and less horrific, example of such behaviour is Susan Boyle from Britain’s Got Talent. In the space of 3 days clips of her crooning had racked up over 100 million views on YouTube (still rising) with various versions occupying 7 of the top 10 most viewed spots this month. And this wasn’t just a YouTube phenomenon – check out the surge in global search terms too.

In this case the 'Badger Lady' had the advantage of over 10million people (est.) seeing the clip first hand on TV instigating the conversation before any cyberspace fun began. The ball was rolling already.

This is the key. Get the ball rolling then let the masses take over. Why wouldn’t you want to watch something that everybody else is talking about? So how do you set the ball rolling without the luxury of a spontaneous story or a primed TV audience?

Fallon give a great example of how to do this with their rather random “Kittens Inspired by Kittens” YouTube clip (now with over 4million views). Whilst focusing on making content sharable, interesting and ‘imperfect’, their main trick for setting the ball rolling was to find and use key online influencers, often found in the most random corners of the web.

Amidst the current Social Media zeitgeist this type of ‘Influencer’ strategy is becoming increasingly relevant and useful. We’re catching on to the fact that simply plonking a video of a dog running into a wall and ‘hoping’ somebody latches onto it isn’t always enough (although there are, of course, exceptions!).

Don’t just think about how to tell your own story, think about who’s going to tell it for you, who they’re going to tell it to and where they’re going to tell it.

Then leave it to the masses.

But be careful if you’re planning on starting a religion.

Online Copycats

Loren Coleman specialises in suicide prevention and in his book, The Copycat Effect, he examines suicides committed by prominent public figures over the last 300 years. Interestingly, in the majority of cases such suicides were followed by a near immediate increase in the overall suicide rate. He also found that there were usually links between the public figures and those in the general public that killed themselves – in method and, more interestingly, in physical appearance and lifestyle.

He cites, for example, the death of Marilyn Monroe in 1962. In the month after her death there were 197 suicides in the US that corresponded closely to that of the actress, and most were young blonde women. Weird?

Perhaps not. Most people relate to celebrities, at least on some level. We admire those who stand up for what we believe in, follow those who like the same things that we like and, more often than not, like to feel that we’re just a bit like them. Now I’m not suggesting that we’ll all be topping ourselves at the first sight of our favourite celeb's death, but such sheep-like behaviour is all part of human nature.

Asch proved that we’d happily agree with the masses when answering a simple question, even if, instinctively, it felt wrong. When queuing to use the urinals we always stand at least a metre away (apparently!). It’s just what everybody does. So we follow suit.

This has huge implications when it comes to the world of online communities. Social networks provide vast opportunities for peers to link up and to publish and share their thoughts, actions, lifestyle, etc. It’s a perfect way to find more people even more like you. You can join a group, follow bloggers, chat to music fans of similar taste. Peer to peer? For sure.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not implying that the online social scene is a grooming ground for lemmings, but it is a perfect arena for the “Copycat Effect”. Rather scarily, could the Bridgend suicides be a rather tragic example?