Although the foundations of self-interested herding and collective herding are very different, there are some resonances between them. Some perspectives on collective herding explain how the whole group functions as if it were a rational individual, and this is captured in the literature on the wisdom of crowds.3 Individuals grouping together can sometimes come up with better answers than if they are all deciding separately and independently. The inspiration for the wisdom of crowds concept comes from the eighteenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet, and his analysis forms the basis for what is now known as Condorcet’s jury principle. It is often applied to juries, a real-world example of how we place our hopes in the wisdom of a collective judgement.4 But Condorcet’s original analysis was not about juries at all. It was a highly abstract mathematical proof. Condorcet started his theory with a pair of decision-makers, each of whom is slightly more likely than not to know the right answer: Condorcet assumed that the probability that each decision-maker is correct is a little greater than ½. He then analysed what happened as other decision-makers were included in the decision-making. Condorcet’s mathematics showed that the chances of the group being correct increases and increases as more and more decision-makers join the initial pair. Eventually, as the pair grows from a group into a crowd, then the probability that they will, collectively, identify the right answer approaches 1. If the crowd is infinitely large, then it will almost certainly be correct. This seems like a great result – until we consider the opposite. Condorcet’s mathematics also showed that if each individual decision-maker is slightly less likely than not to know the right answer – if their probability of being correct is just a little less than ½ – then the collective answer does not look so smart. As the pair of wrong-headed decision-makers grows into a crowd, then the probability that the crowd will, collectively, identify the right answer approaches 0. Under this second scenario, an infinitely large crowd will almost certainly be wrong.
The real-world question is: how can we ensure that our crowd includes people who, as individuals, are more likely to be correct than not? The American psychologists David Budescu and Eva Chen outline some strategies for leveraging wise crowds to improve collective decision-making. How can a crowd be designed to ensure that Condorcet’s conditions for the wisdom of crowds are met? A simple solution is to exclude all poor performers: just omit the judgements of those who have a record of being wrong more often than they are right. Budescu and Chen support their hypothesis by analysing data from the Forecasting ACE (Aggregate Contingent Estimation) project.5 This website collects together judgements from volunteer forecasters known as ‘judges’. The judges do not have to be experts in any conventional sense. They are asked to forecast a range of events from economics through to politics, health and technology. Budescu and Chen collected and analysed data from the ACE website to assess the performance of 1,233 judges forecasting 104 events between July 2010 and January 2012. They scored the judges according to the accuracy of their predictions. By identifying the best contributors within the crowd and eliminating those whose forecasts were wrong more often than the average forecaster, Budescu and Chen showed that their selection method increased the accuracy of predictions by approximately 28 per cent.6
Embedding the wisdom of crowds idea more generally into real-world decision-making is problematic, however. Budescu and Chen selected the better judges on the basis of the accuracy of past forecasts. But in a world that is profoundly uncertain we cannot easily devise objective benchmarks against which we can judge who is getting it right and who is getting it wrong. A further theoretical problem with Condorcet’s jury principle is its starting assumption that all the individuals’ initial judgements are completely independent and uncorrelated – a testing assumption, especially given the human tendency to follow others. Opinions are more often correlated than independent. There may be a number of reasons for correlated opinions. Experts and others may share a belief in an established paradigm (e.g. ‘the world is flat’). People who share identities may agree with each other even when there is little objective reason to do so. Biases in our thinking may lead us to agree with others when objective evidence suggests we should not.
Le Bon’s psychological crowds
Condorcet’s wisdom of crowds is a simple mathematical analysis that abstracts from the complexities of human psychology. It bypasses the important psychological drivers in our social lives: personality and emotions. If we have a conformist personality, then we will move with groups, herds and crowds more often. If we are curmudgeons, we will feel more inclined to rebel. Emotions are important too.7 We join herds when we fear for our safety, or when we are anxious we might make the wrong choice. We join crowds to feel happy – at concerts, parties and parades. And emotions and personality will come together in driving our choices. Personality traits predispose us towards specific emotions. In turn, these emotions will determine whether we are inclined to join in or to go it alone. An introverted, anxious person might join a crowd if they feel threatened, but they will be less inclined to attend a big, loud party.
Gustave Le Bon was one of the early pioneers in the study of how our copycat psychology unfolds in herds and crowds, and his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind endures as a seminal analysis of crowd psychology. Le Bon was a French medical doctor who developed wide-ranging interests across the social sciences, particularly sociology and psychology. His fascination with mob psychology was driven by his curiosity about how crowds form around specific causes, and The Crowd draws strong parallels between the psychology of the crowd and political movements. This was a reflection of the instability of his times. Le Bon was born in 1841 and was a child during the 1848 ‘Year of Revolution’, a year of great political significance marking a turning point in Western democracy. With increasing demands for new democratic institutions to replace old feudal structures, uprisings started in France and soon spread to many other European countries and beyond. As an adult, Le Bon was living in Paris during the brief, revolutionary government of the Paris Commune in 1871. In response to the violence he observed he developed a conservative attitude towards political uprisings. In his accounts of mob psychology he presents a dystopian view of the impacts of collective political action. Even so, his psychological work was politically influential. Jaap van Ginneken, a Dutch psychologist and former activist and journalist, observes that even though Le Bon’s ideas were largely derivative they remained influential with a wide range of the twentieth century’s political leaders (good and bad), from Theodore Roosevelt to Adolf Hitler.8
Le Bon was inspired by the ideas of French sociologist Jean-Gabriel De Tarde, who had argued that we are driven by conscious and unconscious motivations to imitate each other.9 Building on Tarde’s insight that imitation is one thing that is fundamental to our social interactions, Le Bon describes two very different sorts of crowds – what he called organised crowds and psychological crowds.10 An organised crowd is a collection of individuals coincidentally gathered in one place – just a group of ordinary people going about their business in an ordinary way, with no obvious common purpose. Organised crowds may be large, but they are benign. Sometimes, however, organised crowds are transformed into Le Bon’s psychological crowds, or what we might call a mob. Mobs are fundamentally different from organised crowds because they form a sinister identity of their own that cannot be explained from the perspective of any individual mob-member. Each individual loses their personality and sense of personal identity.11 Each individual’s intelligence is swamped, and so the mob is characterised by a lower degree of intelligence than the individuals within it:
however like or unlike [are the individuals’] mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from [what each] individual . . . would feel, think and act were he in a state of isolation . . . the intellect
ual aptitudes of the individuals, and in consequence their individuality, are weakened . . .12
Mob behaviour is impetuous. Instincts are unrestrained. For each person, their ‘conscious personality vanishes’. Someone who might usually be sensible, logical and calm becomes wild and unruly. They become much more suggestible. It is as if the mob is exerting a hypnotic influence on its constituent members. Another famous Victorian writer on crowds and mobs, Charles Mackay, mirrored Le Bon’s insights about how we lose reason in herds, observing: ‘Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.’13
Le Bon’s description of the mob is colourful and engaging, but what can he tell us about how to understand and analyse collective herding? One of his key lessons is that we cannot start by assuming that mobs are a simple aggregation of individuals. Mob members are not engaging in self-interested herding. The mob is driven by forces that are hard, if not impossible, to explain as the product of individual motivations and incentives.
Freud on belonging
If not self-interest, what does encourage us to join a group or mob? We cannot easily explain this solely in terms of the logical and tangible incentives and motivations that are the focus of economic analysis. Joining the herd gives us an ineffable sense of psychological satisfaction. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, developed some early insights about how our relationships with others affect our psychological lives, including the urges and instincts that propel us to join groups and herds.14 Freud’s analysis focuses on the roles played by our unconscious in shaping our feelings and choices. In The Pleasure Principle (1920), he argued that our personalities are prone to conflicts between our life instinct (Eros) and our death instinct (Thanatos). These connect with unconscious facets of our personality – the id, ego and superego, as Freud sets out in his 1923 masterpiece The Ego and the Id. Freud’s analysis of the conscious and unconscious forces driving people’s actions suggests that personalities are not formed as one homogenous whole. Psychological forces operating below the level of our consciousness are driving all our decisions, including our copycat choices. With self-interested herding, perhaps the more rational and deliberative ego is in control. With collective herding, perhaps the more instinctive and less rational id takes over.
Freud directly applied some of his insights to the analysis of mobs and crowds, reflecting his interest in the political psychology of mass movements. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), he developed Le Bon’s idea that individual personalities are lost when we seek security within groups. Paralleling Le Bon’s distinction between organised crowds and psychological crowds, Freud distinguished ‘organised’ and ‘artificial’ groups from ‘common groups’ – a corollary of Le Bon’s psychological crowds. People become more susceptible to communal emotions and instincts when they join a common group. They lose independence, initiative and their sense of individuality. Their identification with the group overwhelms their own selves. Freud took on the idea that herd instincts are innate – a notion that British neurosurgeon Wilfred Trotter had developed in his popular book about herd instincts.15 Trotter argued that herd instinct is a primary instinct, to be grouped with fundamental urges associated with self-preservation, nutrition and sex. Freud countered, arguing that our need to belong to a group has its origins in family relationships. All our drives to join groups and herds reflect our unconscious need to belong. In our unconscious minds, opposing the herd is as bad as separating from it, and separation generates extreme anxiety.
Drawing on Trotter’s observation that people feel incomplete when they are alone, Freud argued that this anxiety parallels a similar fear in small children. According to Freud, the roots of this separation anxiety, and of social instincts more generally, lie in children’s attachments to their parents. A child with a new sibling feels jealous but realises that their jealousy will poison their relationship with their parents. They sublimate their jealous feelings and replace them with familial feelings for their siblings. The child forms an affinity with their sibling to reconcile their conflict between jealousy and attachment to their parents. Freud argues that, as adults, this childhood conflict is generalised in our social feelings towards other adults around us. We reverse our hostility towards others and replace it with a more positive sense of a tie with others. So, perhaps ironically, envy leads us to identify with our rivals. This forms the basis for Gemeingeist, or ‘group spirit’. Freud illustrates this with an example of fan behaviour:
We have only to think of the troop . . . in love in an enthusiastically sentimental way, who crowd round a singer or pianist after his performance. It would certainly be easy for each of them to be jealous of the rest; but, in the face of their numbers and the consequent impossibility of their reaching the aim of their love, they renounce it, and, instead of pulling out one another’s hair, they act as a united group, do homage to the hero of the occasion with their common actions, and would probably be glad to have a share of his flowing locks. Originally rivals, they have succeeded in identifying themselves with one another by means of a similar love for the same object . . .16
For these unconscious conflicts to work, all the followers in a herd must be equals.17 Again, for Freud, this parallels childhood experience. For the children’s jealousy to be held in check no one child within the family can be favoured, and Freud argues that this forms the roots of our preoccupation with equality within the herd.
Gestalt psychology and psychosociology
Freud’s insights inspired other psychoanalysts and psychologists to explore the nature of groups and herds. We have emphasised already that we can only understand collective herding if we understand the mob as an entity with its own identity, an identity that is substantively different from the separate identities of the individuals in the mob. Groups, crowds and mobs cannot be understood by simply adding together the self-interested choices of the individuals within them, as economists tend to do. In his treatise Metaphysics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle observed, ‘the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts’.18 This idea is exemplified in the assertion from Gestaltian Kurt Koffka that ‘the whole is something else than the sum of the parts’.19 This essential principle of Gestalt psychology was originally applied in the context of visual perception. When we look at a photo we do not see a mass of pixels and dots. We see an image of something that is quite different in nature than the physical object. Optical illusions work on the idea that our perception changes as we shift our perspective. This idea of the whole being something other than the sum of its parts also links to group phenomena: like the photo, the group has a nature and identity of its own which we cannot understand just by looking at the individual group members as if they are separate pixels.
Wilhelm Reich, a psychoanalyst and pupil of Sigmund Freud, developed Gestalt principles in the context of the lesser-known social science of psychosociology. Reich was born in 1897 and, like Gustave Le Bon, was interested in the mass psychology of political movements, including the rise of fascism in the early twentieth century.20 Reich aimed to bring together insights from political science and psychoanalysis. He argued that the structure of our characters develops as a product of social institutions and processes.21 He believed that mental illness is not just about a person’s character, as Freud would argue. Rather, he asserted that it also reflects the domestic and socioeconomic conditions in which people lived, and he drew on Marx’s insights in developing this idea.
Echoing Le Bon, Reich argued that social groups influence us as individuals. Groups make us into something more than our independent selves. In groups, we are driven by the goals and desires of the whole group, and not by the interests of the individuals within it. Groups and individuals evolve from the influence of the other, reflecting tensions and conflicts between the two. The group changes the individual and the in
dividual changes the group. The Jonestown massacre illustrates these interplays and feedbacks. The Peoples Temple changed its individual members: each joined the cult as ordinary Christians, a decision which transformed their lives, identities and destinies. Perhaps less obviously, the members also changed the cult. If Jim Jones had not been able to persuade anyone other than his close confidantes to join, then the Peoples Temple would probably have been forgotten. With so many individuals prepared to join it and to sacrifice so much to defend it, the cult’s nature and identity changed. The Peoples Temple would have had neither power nor influence without its people. As the cult transformed the cultists so the cultists transformed the cult.
Some of Reich’s ideas parallel similar analyses in economic psychology, for example in the work of George Katona, one of the forefathers of modern economic psychology. Katona focused on the ways in which many of our personal goals interact with group goals. The power of the group is determined by how powerfully each member identifies with the group. Katona theorised that this will determine how individuals interact with groups during herding and social learning. There will be feedbacks between the individual and the group. As individual group members imitate each other, this reinforces the coherence of the whole group.22 Football fans are an everyday example of this phenomenon. When they emulate their team and other fans – by buying and wearing the same football strip, for example – this reinforces the cohesiveness of the entire football club. The football club needs its fans as much as the fans need their football club.
Mob identities
If collective herding is not driven by our self-interest, why is it so powerful and cohesive? Identity is one of the essential factors determining the power of groups and collective herds. Theories of identity are captured in different ways across the social sciences, and we can rethink identity in the light of evidence derived from psychology and sociology alongside economic analyses.
Copycats and Contrarians Page 5