Copycats and Contrarians

by Michelle Baddeley

  Figure 3. A line experiment: a subject is asked to guess which line matches the horizontal line, when the herd says ‘B’.

  For researchers, interpreting the findings from Asch’s experiments is not easy. The conforming behaviour that Asch and his colleagues observed could be attributed to one of two types of social influence. To recap from the introduction: informational influences are about following others because we believe that others’ actions are informative; and normative influences are about us feeling a less concrete and more unconscious need to conform to peer pressures and social norms. Failing to conform generates awkwardness and can lead to confrontation and confusion. Conformity is much easier: it provides psychological reassurance, and is psychologically satisfying, especially if it means we can minimise inter-personal conflicts.

  So, are the participants in Asch’s line judgement experiments responding to informational influences or normative influences? Are they worrying about what others will think of them, and agreeing with the group because of social norms and sociopsychological factors more generally? Or are the line-judgement task participants in fact trying to learn something by observing others’ behaviour, consistent with the models of self-interested herding from the previous chapter?

  The Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller has argued that following others in giving wrong answers in simple tasks is not inconsistent with rational social learning.37 People may, rationally, discount the accuracy of their own judgements if they see a lot of other people coming up with a different answer. One possible explanation is that the students were using a Bayesian reasoning process to balance different bits of information, as described in chapter 1. Self-interested herders, engaging their social learning faculties, could rationally conclude that there is only a slim chance that they are right and everyone else is wrong. Shiller quotes one of Asch’s participants explaining, ‘To me it seems I’m right, but my reason tells me I’m wrong, because I doubt that so many people could be wrong and I alone right.’38 Particularly in situations of uncertainty, when people have little faith in their own judgements, they will overestimate the accuracy of other people’s.

  Shiller also notes that findings similar to Asch’s have been identified in studies of human–computer interactions. If participants behave in similar ways outside a human-to-human context, then perhaps this suggests that personal social pressure was not the key influence and participants were using logic and reason to balance their own judgement against those of others. But what if people engage with computers as if they are real people? Then Shiller’s justification heads into the territory of unfalsifiable hypotheses. We could use a similar logic to justify any action as rational, without having empirical evidence to verify it. We cannot objectively refute a psychological explanation grounded in unconscious sociopsychological motivations based on humans’ interactions with computers. Whilst it may be hard to imagine what sort of experiment could be designed to separate completely the economic and psychological explanations, neuroscience is giving us deeper insights into these and other types of decision-making conflicts. In the next chapter, we shall explore how neuroscientific tools such as brain imaging can be used to unravel these conundrums, giving us more and richer information about whether copycats and contrarians are driven by instincts and emotions, cognition and deliberation, or some combination of the two.

  Learning social norms

  Another form of sociopsychological influence comes from social norms, which differ from peer pressure because they are more diffuse and enduring. Social norms are sticky – in other words, they are hard to shift. This allows them to operate even when we are not directly in contact with the group. If social norms operate even outside group settings, where do they come from? They operate at a deep unconscious level, sometimes reflecting influences from our childhoods. Children’s behaviour often mirrors that of the adults around them as they learn by observing others. This observational learning is driven by our ingrained instincts to imitate. Psychologist Albert Bandura explored these ideas in constructing his social learning theory. Bandura focused on the role of cognition in imitation, particularly amongst children. He identified a link between the aggressive behaviour of children who had earlier observed aggressive behaviour in adults. In his experiment, Bandura and his team left groups of toddlers to play in a room full of toys and exposed them to three different scenarios. In the first ‘aggressive’ scenario, the children played while an adult in the room behaved aggressively towards a doll. In the second ‘non-aggressive’ scenario, an adult in the room was playing quietly and non-aggressively. In the third ‘control’ scenario, no adult was present. Bandura and his team discovered that the children in the aggressive scenario, who had had an opportunity to observe an adult’s aggression, were more likely to imitate the adult’s violent behaviour in their own play. The children’s acts of aggression mimicked the specific physical actions of the adult, suggesting that children’s instinct to imitate adults has a strong influence on their behaviour.39

  Social pressure as a policy lever

  We have seen a range of ways in which economic incentives and psychological influences can feed into our instincts to imitate and form groups, herds and crowds. But, so what? Why are these insights useful? They are useful because people’s susceptibility to peer pressure can be used as a policy tool, to moderate the negative impacts that some of our behaviours have on communities more widely. Whether learning by imitating others or deciding collectively, herding sometimes enables better decision-making, from the perspective of both the individual and the group. We are social animals and are generally rewarded for behaving in a prosocial way, so social norms have a powerful influence on our behaviour. If teenagers copy their peers in their choices and habits, then they are probably more likely to be invited to the coolest parties. From an individualistic perspective, sometimes our own self-interest will be promoted if we conform to the norms of the herd. Social norms are built around others’ behaviour because other people around us give us our standards for behaviour. We compare our own behaviour with what others are doing, and others’ behaviour provides us with what behavioural economists call our social reference points. We make our own decisions by reference to what we believe to be the average, conventional decision of the group. We do this either because we believe that larger numbers of people agreeing with each other are more likely to be correct, and/or because belonging to a group strengthens our sense of belonging.

  Many organisations, from marketers to government policymakers, use peer pressure and social reference points to leverage copycats’ conformist natures. A range of research studies, including a large-scale study of OPower customers in California, showed that many (though not all) people are likely to reduce their energy consumption if they think their consumption exceeds the average of their friends and neighbours.40 In the UK, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs found that taxpayers were more likely to pay a late bill if they were told that they were in a small minority of late payers. Information about crowd behaviour often encouraged taxpayer conformity, though not always.41

  Our conformist instincts have also been harnessed for public health improvements in low income countries. Sanitation habits are an essential ingredient for public health: disease is reduced when people defecate into latrines rather than in open public spaces. The World Health Organization (WHO) has explored the impact of peers’ opinions on people’s existing habits as a tool to improve sanitation – especially in underdeveloped rural regions where there are high levels of infant mortality.42 A WHO team of social researchers recognised that economic incentives and disincentives, such as subsidies and fines, have little impact on sanitation habits when social norms and traditions are strong. They also suspected that it is not enough for people just to know things to change their behaviour. To investigate these ideas, the researchers designed and implemented a field experiment in Orissa, India. They targeted 1,050 households across 20 villages, rolling out an information campaign educating people abo
ut the importance of sanitation, clean water and good hygiene. To test the idea that knowledge is not enough to change ingrained behaviour, the researchers included a treatment condition in their experiment. They combined their education campaign with a deliberate attempt to tap into people’s unconscious instincts via a social trigger to leverage people’s social emotions. Thus, the WHO’s ‘Community Led Sanitation’ scheme incorporated a ‘walk of shame’ during which all members of the community would walk together and identify instances of poor hygiene along the way. The team also developed ‘defecation maps’, with the villagers helping to identify the spatial distribution of defecation. The volume of faecal matter was calculated and discussed amongst the villagers, along with information about its likely impacts.

  The WHO’s ‘shame or subsidy’ policy tapped into psychological influences to encourage the use of public sanitation infrastructure, funded via development initiatives from international multilateral organisations including the World Bank. The policy was effective but controversial. In some villages, latrine use increased from 6 per cent to around 30 per cent. Public shaming triggered social emotions, and peer pressure worked to change people’s ingrained habits – habits that were harmful to them and others around them. This evidence was used by the WHO to advocate policies for improving people’s sanitation habits based around ‘social marketing’ – a euphemism for using social pressure and peer monitoring as policy tools. But the ethical dimensions of this study and the consequent policy implications are complex. Was it appropriate for policymakers to manipulate behaviour by using people’s relationships with each other – however well intentioned? Whatever the answer, the WHO evidence does show that our copycat natures and our susceptibility to peer pressure can be an effective complement to traditional economic policy instruments, including taxes and subsidies, in improving people’s living conditions. The power of these solutions is not about appealing to our self-interest. It is about tapping into our unconscious sociopsychological drivers, including our susceptibility to the influence of others around us.

  In this chapter we have explored the many ways in which mob psychology distorts our behaviour. We have also explored how this links with the concept of collective herding, in which group behaviour is not explicable in terms of the individual self-interest of the herd’s members. Insights from psychology help us to understand why and how collective herds seem to have minds and missions of their own, and why individuals lose their sense of self when they join a collective herd.

  When we copy others, are we just being logical and self-interested? Or are we driven by some unconscious psychological instinct to imitate and conform? Considering the different explanations for self-interested herding versus collective herding, as outlined in this and the previous chapter, what can we conclude about the relative power of economic and sociopsychological explanations? Do other social sciences capture these group behaviours more powerfully than economics? Yes and no. In contrast to the economists, psychologists and sociologists focus much more on how and why personality, emotions and social norms drive our choices to join herds, mobs and crowds. They can explain collective herding. They also explore a range of other more diffuse and unconscious forces. These influences are powerful, not only during extreme episodes of collective madness such as the Jonestown massacre, but also in more ordinary situations in which we choose to lose our personal autonomy and ignore our own self-interest by joining a group. But whilst peer pressure, identity and group influences are crucial in understanding mob psychology, we should not forget the economists’ models of self-interested herding. In many contexts, we have more straightforward and logical motivations and incentives to follow others. Economic goals and incentives are important motivators too.

  In the next two chapters, we will introduce some studies from the behavioural and biological sciences, including cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary biology and behavioural ecology. Scientists working in these fields have added new and fascinating dimensions to our understanding of copycats and contrarians. They have also shown us ways to combine the divergent explanations from economics and the other social sciences. With the broader understanding of human motivations and drivers enabled by a more general theory, we should be able to smooth away some of the apparent contradictions between the economists’ conventional models of self-interested herding and other social scientists’ models of collective herding.

  3

  Herding on the brain

  In an allegory written in 360 BC, Plato imagines a dialogue between Socrates and an Athenian nobleman named Phaedrus. The pair sit together under a plane tree on the banks of the Ilissus river in Athens. Socrates contemplates madness. He explains to Phaedrus the nature of the soul, in both its human and divine forms. Socrates postulates that the human soul is a chariot – a pair of winged horses driven by a charioteer. The first horse is ‘noble’ and ‘good’, the second ‘ignoble’ and ‘bad’. And our charioteers struggle to control the ignoble horse:

  The right-hand horse is upright and cleanly made . . . he is a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only. The other is a crooked lumbering animal, put together anyhow . . . [he] is the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur . . . heedless of the pricks and of the blows of the whip, [he] plunges and runs away, giving all manner of trouble to his companion and the charioteer . . . he persists in plaguing them, they yield and agree to do as he bids them . . . [The horses are] carried round below the surface, plunging, treading on one another, each striving to be first; and there is confusion and perspiration and the extremity of effort; and many of them are lamed or have their wings broken through the ill-driving of the charioteers; and all of them after a fruitless toil, not having attained to the mysteries of true being, go away, and feed upon opinion.1

  What has this got to do with copycats and contrarians? The divergent accounts of self-interested herding and collective herding seem as irreconcilable and mutually exclusive as the noble and ignoble horses, and we are left in a quandary. Are the economists, focusing on reason and deliberation, correct to assume that herding is a rational, individualistic choice formed by our capacity for logical reasoning? Or are psychologists and sociologists, focusing on collective herding as the outcome of ephemeral emotions and socio-psychological instincts, correct to emphasise what some would call the ‘irrational’ aspects of our behaviours? Plato’s allegory is interesting because it suggests that both approaches have merits. If we can bring them together then, potentially, we will have a much more powerful account of herding. We might be able to develop a more general theory to capture the rich and myriad ways in which our copycat and contrarian natures interact in our daily lives.

  A key problem for social scientists studying social behaviour and crowd psychology is that we have not been able to see how copycats and contrarians reach their decisions. We can observe what people choose, but without knowing the deeper processes underlying these decisions and actions. For economists specifically, the human brain has been like a black box.2 We may know what people know and we can observe their choices but we cannot see how the brain processes the information before a person’s choices are revealed. For this reason, empirical economics has tended to focus on quantifying people’s observed behaviour (a preoccupation it shares with behavioural psychology). Evidence about people’s actions is objective. It can be counted, collated and stored in statistical agencies’ databases. More recently, experimental evidence from ordinary lab experiments has been added to the stores of data, but a lot of experimental evidence is also, essentially, about observing what people choose to do, and fails to capture the underlying psychological mechanisms. For a long time this was as much as social scientists could hope to do while people’s thinking processes were largely unobservable.

  With modern science, however, these constraints are unravelling. The biological sciences ca
n help to fill the gaps in our understanding of our drives and motivations by illuminating how we think about our decisions and choices. Neuroscientists have developed some interesting theories and tools that illuminate how different thinking styles interact when we join crowds and herds. They can show that different parts of our brains are activated in different contexts. We engage different brain areas when we are feeling emotions, and these brain areas are distinct from, but sometimes complementary to, the parts of our brain that are activated when we are thinking analytically. Reflecting Plato’s early speculation about the different facets of our souls, reason and emotion do not operate independently. Capturing the complex interactions between them not only adds to our understanding of copycats and contrarians. It also illustrates that social scientists’ debates about whether herding is driven by rational or irrational influences are increasingly redundant.

  Personality struggles

  Plato’s suggestion that opposing forces within our personalities are driving us has been a theme throughout intellectual history. Some of our modern thinking about personality struggles has its origins in Sigmund Freud’s work, which we introduced in the previous chapter, though modern scientists strive to be more objective and empirical. The idea that our choices are driven by an interaction of different thinking systems is now re-emerging alongside empirical tools to test the power of these hypotheses. Economic psychologist and economics Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman has spent his career exploring psychological influences on decision-making, and popularised the key insights in his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow.3 Kahneman distinguishes between reason and emotion but, as is the norm in modern science, he crafts his analysis of the duality of our character in less judgemental language than Plato’s. Competition between our different thinking styles is not about a battle between good and evil, between our noble and our ignoble souls. Sometimes reason is a good guide, sometimes emotion is a good guide, sometimes the best guide is a combination of reason and emotion together.