Insight from Esther Inglis-Arkell:
Going with the herd makes us feel safe, but herd behavior can go very wrong. It’s not just crowds panicking and trampling. Enough of a crowd, and enough familiarity, will let smart people make exactly the wrong choice….
When the energy of the crowd heats up, or when the herd is forced through choke points, things start to go badly. Studies show that people begin making “involuntary movements,” as the crowd around them gets more chaotic. Waves move through the crowd – often from the front backwards – knocking people off their feet and crushing them. When individuals in a crowd lose control, people get killed….
They also turn off their judgment in the presence of people – any other people. Avalanche training [for example] reduced the amount of risk to the person, but their risk of getting involved in accidents shot up when other people were around. When a group decides on a plan, they are unlikely to change it, keeping people walking along a route even when they should notice it’s dangerous. Groups also make people feel safe, letting them take more dangerous courses. When people see others, or even past evidence of others, at a site, they keep to the established path even when they were trained to know better. If other people have done it, or are doing it, it has to be okay. Supposedly, putting a person with safety training with a group will let that person guide the group out of dangerous situations. Actually, it seems that putting trained people with a group will get the “leaders” to drift with the group.
And that’s the problem with herd behavior. There are plenty of ways that people risk themselves, but most of them involve the people knowingly taking the risk. When herd behavior takes over, people don’t realize when they are taking risks. They stop analyzing the situation, and go with the group, with the plan, with the familiar way. That makes it easy to drift into disaster without ever being aware that they’re in danger.
Via “Going with the Crowd” Causes Us to Make the Wrong Choices @ io9.