Walk the Week - Don't Follow the Crowd

I remember a few years ago going to a football match at Old Trafford to watch Manchester United play Spurs. We were at the end of the ground where the away fans were in a section of the stadium to our left. Their team scored first - and the fans went into raptures, loudly singing their club’s anthems. Then United equalised and a few minutes later took the lead. The whole of our part of the crowd turned almost as one in the direction of the Tottenham fans chanting “You’re not singing, you’re not singing, you’re not singing anymore!” It was exhilarating to be caught up in the moment giving voice to this shared feeling. It is so easy when you are part of a crowd to go along with them and great fun in the right circumstances. But at the same time that makes it very hard to be objective. I went to another match this time away at Fulham where I and some of my family had seats in the Fulham season ticket stand at Craven Cottage in London. When Manchester United scored, this time I had (for reasons of self preservation) to curb my exhilaration and celebration in the midst of the very disappointed Fulham supporters, which was very hard.

In professional work I suggest that one of our most critical skills is the ability to avoid being caught up in the crowd and the “groupthink” as it were and to form our own independent opinions thinking for ourselves. If a general view has been accepted by the majority of any group we are working with, questioning that can be quite hard. We are caught up in the chanting crowd and stop thinking for ourselves.

There is some science behind this sort of behaviour. See this article ?Collective Behavior and Why Some Crowds Get Out of Control in Discover Magazine which cites the Congress invasion “In the months after the Jan. 6 riot in Washington, D.C. in 2021, several defendants claimed that their crimes weren’t their fault. According to their defense teams: The crowd made them do it.” It says such thinking is not new “Back in the late 1800s, French scholar Gustave Le Bon argued that, when in a large crowd, individuals can lose their ability to think rationally. The crowd, he wrote, serves as a hypnotic influence that triggers otherwise rational people to become violent.” Le Bon wrote a book in 1895 “the Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” in which he developed this “contagion theory”. However another article Explaining Collective Behaviour suggests thinking has moved on from the nineteenth century and there are now more theories:

·?????? Contagion theory assumes that individuals act irrationally as they come under the hypnotic influence of a crowd.

·?????? Convergence theory assumes that crowd behavior reflects the preexisting values and beliefs and behavioral disposition of the individuals who join a crowd.

·?????? Emergent norm theory assumes that norms emerge after people gather for collective behavior, and that their behavior afterward is largely rational.

·?????? Value-added theory argues that collective behavior results when several conditions exist, including structural strain, generalized beliefs, precipitating factors, and lack of social control.

See also this Wikipedia article on Herd Mentality which proposes this has its roots in evolution: “animals acquire information to make important decisions (i.e. where to forage and mating potential) by monitoring the interactions of others with their environment.” It also considers the topic from the perspective of neuroscience, psychology and sociology. For example, neuroscience suggests “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.”

Whatever the theories or rationale, the challenge for us as professionals is how to avoid going along with the crowd and being able to adopt a fresh and independent perspective – analysing the problem for ourselves and coming to our own conclusion. This may mirror the thinking of the group we are in, but it could also reveal a fundamental flaw that nobody else has spotted – or at least voiced. If I am participating in a meeting and one of the participants is very quiet, I find they are usually worth drawing in as they invariably have a different and valuable viewpoint they have just not felt confident enough to express.

See this Harvard Business Review article How to Steer Clear of Groupthink which observes that “Unfortunately, research shows that consensus-based problem-solving groups are often where innovative ideas go to die. These groups are highly prone to groupthink – quick agreement around status quo solutions with little discussion or deliberation.” One way around this is to challenge the status quo “What we saw in the groups that overcame groupthink is that it began with one member expressing dissatisfaction with the status quo.” This is where the independent thinking comes in.

This World Economic Forum article Here are 5 ways to become an independent thinker and a successful leadersuggests “Independent thinkers are refreshing. They use their own lens to filter information and inform their thoughts. Independent thinkers don’t allow other people’s thinking to become their thinking. They don’t adopt information “as is.”” It proposes 5 ways to promote such thinking including:

·?????? Read. Reading other people’s words exposes you to their thoughts.

·?????? Identify the other argument. Play devil’s advocate, and challenge your views.

·?????? Interact with people who are different than you.

While this Northeastern University article aimed at science undergraduates Working Independently suggests three key characteristics:

·?????? Self-Awareness - your knowledge and understanding of yourself – your emotions, beliefs, assumptions, biases, knowledge base, abilities, motivations, interests, etc.

·?????? Self-Motivation - your ability to identify effective methods of getting yourself to move from thought to action.

·?????? Self-Regulation - your ability to affect personal and professional growth based on your self-awareness and motivation.

This challenge of not going with the crowd is I suggest being compounded in education and business by the increasing use of AI as a mechanism to provide so called independent and creative thinking – which it truly is not. I spoke recently to a colleague who cited a US scholar who used AI to write a paper, then to make it look like it was not written by AI and thirdly to check if it met the required college criteria. Creative – yes. Promoting independent thinking – no. This approach ?is not I suggest the creative, well researched independent thinking of a human author.

Albert Einstein was alleged to have said (the derivation is not clear and he probably did not) "The one who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The one who walks alone is likely to find themselves in places no one has ever been before”.

What he definitely did say was “Small is the number of them that see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.”

As Confucius observed “The superior person is in harmony, but does not follow the crowd. The lesser person follows the crowd, but is not in harmony.”