Copycats and Contrarians

by Michelle Baddeley

  In some places, for example cities, formal and informal forms of ‘place-based’ leadership are a key determinant of economic growth. Regional scientists Andrew Beer and Terry Clower have unravelled some of the roots of what is called ‘place-based’ leadership, that is, leaders who represent specific places – for example, local communities, local authorities, cities, regions and states. Effective leaders can help communities and regions to form and implement a vision of what they want for the future, monitor the progress of policies, and adjust strategies when those policies are not turning out as expected. Place-based leadership can take many forms depending on the organisational context. Sometimes leadership is formalised within traditional hierarchies and formal roles, such as city mayors. Other times, leadership can be more informal, such as community-based leaders. Informal leadership often leverages ‘slack resources’ – people who have the time and energy to volunteer, for example in representing their communities on advisory committees for regional development agencies. No one type of leadership is more important than the other. Both formal and informal leadership are essential to a region’s success. And regions need a diversity of leaders. As for any leadership, the personalities of place-based leaders do not necessarily fit the stereotype of a loud and gregarious ‘great leader’ who leads by talking. Undoubtedly, ‘loud leaders’ can be better at building networks and contacts, but ‘quiet leaders’ also have distinct qualities: they lead by doing, and focus on building trust and effective collaborative relationships. All these qualities contribute as much to leadership as extraversion and an imposing personality. Overall, Beer and Clower conclude that effective leadership is indispensable at a local and regional level. Places with good leaders are more likely to succeed economically because economic performance is no longer so dependent on whatever resources may be available in a local area. Building infrastructure and attracting entrepreneurs and skilled workforces are all irreplaceable. Budgetary constraints are crucial too: in countries where government expenditure is centralised, effective leaders can make a difference to how much a specific region is supported by central authorities.8

  Following neighbours

  Consumers’ inclinations to follow the leader can be harnessed as an economic policy tool, encouraging us to herd behind others, sometimes helping to reduce the external costs incurred when individuals act in their own self-interest while disregarding the economic consequences for the wider economy. Some examples relate to energy and the environment. Leaders can act as champions for constructive social behaviours, facilitating social learning about best environmental practice. In the UK, a group of environmental scientists conducted some experiments to explore workers’ environmental behaviours via an ‘Environmental Champions’ programme. Over three months, Environmental Champions were assigned to lead 280 office-based workers in campaigning, improving environmental information and providing practical advice about how to reduce environmental footprints. The programme was very effective: it led to a 12 per cent reduction in energy consumption and a 38 per cent reduction in waste production in the participants’ workplaces. Environmental Champion leaders played a constructive role, inculcating good environmental practices in their followers.9

  Relationships between leaders and followers play a crucial role in determining our consumption choices too. Most of us get information and ideas through social media via personal contacts – friends, friends of friends and friends of friends of friends, and so on. Focusing on the idea that information is most effectively disseminated via personal contacts, economists Andrea Galeotti and Sanjeev Goyal used mathematical models of social networks to capture the leading role played by ‘influencers’ – the small group of people who have a large impact on the choices and decisions of others around them, for example on consumers looking for information to guide their purchases. Galeotti and Goyal call this phenomenon the ‘Law of the Few’: influencers are often leaders prepared to make up their own minds, without needing the reassurance of the herd.10 Why do influencers have such power over the rest of us? There is no difference between them and us, apart from their dense and extensive social networks. They are connected with many more people than the rest of us. Therefore, information about influencers’ choices spreads rapidly around social networks because influencers have so many connections.11

  In our social media-saturated world, influencers have found their way from economic theory into the real business of fashion. Modern marketers understand well the importance of role models and trendsetters, and the impact they can have via social media. By leveraging our instinct to follow leaders in our consumption choices, businesses can generate a lot of additional exposure and sales by identifying and incentivising fashion leaders with hordes of followers to endorse their brands. So, high-end and high-street retailers are now routinely enlisting influencers from around the world to connect with millions of their followers through their social media networks. For example, when launching their Spring–Summer 2016 collection, the fashion chain Mango’s #MangoGirls campaign recruited a selection of female fashion bloggers – specifically those with large numbers of Twitter and Instagram followers – to form a season-on-season relationship with the brand. Similarly, the luxury shoe brand Jimmy Choo has its own group of influencers who disseminate fashion advice and opinions online – always complimentary to the company. Like other fashion companies, it rewards its influencers with freebies and experiences such as #Chootravels – trips to enviably glamorous destinations like Marrakesh, Zermatt and Rajasthan, treating the influencers to keep them onside while simultaneously providing a steady stream of informal advertising. Bloggers and vloggers invited to India by Jimmy Choo had a combined ‘follow-ship’ of 6.5 million people.12

  Why follow the leader? Obedience to authority

  Economic models capture only a small snapshot of our experiences with contrarian leaders and their copycat followers. In an economy filled with self-interested and rational individuals, leader–follower relationships unfold in relatively harmless ways, as we have seen. But our world is not as simple as that portrayed in the economists’ models. Once we introduce sociopsychological influences into the mix, the consequences are not necessarily nearly so benign. A leader cannot lead without an obedient crowd. Followers must be inclined by some power or authority to follow – and social pressure plays a key role not only in sustaining cooperation and mimicry within groups but also in inculcating a follow-the-leader mentality. These social pressures are powerful. We are conditioned to conform not only to a group as a whole, but also to the judgements and opinions of individuals, including parents and seniors, and later in life our bosses and other authority figures. We conform because the real or imagined pushback we get from peer pressure makes us uncomfortable, as we saw in chapter 2 with Solomon Asch’s line experiments. We also conform to the orders or expectations of authority figures partly because of social pressure but also because we fear some sort of retribution.

  These social pressures drive obedience to authority, an essential feature of many leader–follower relationships, and plentiful evidence from social science has shown that, just as we have an instinct to conform, so we have an instinct to obey. With his research group, social psychologist Stanley Milgram developed a series of early (and controversial) experiments to test the limits of our willingness to obey authority figures. Milgram and his team wanted to understand why so many ordinary people are often complicit with their tyrannical governments. Milgram was particularly keen to explore the role played by ordinary people in the atrocities committed by Hitler’s Nazi government – not only why these otherwise ordinary people were prepared to be abnormally vicious, but also why they seemed unprepared to take any personal responsibility for their actions.

  To unravel some of the influences, Milgram and his team set up an experiment requiring their participant volunteers to inflict brutal punishments. How ruthless were ordinary people prepared to be in the process of ‘just following orders’? Milgram’s experimental participants though
t that they had been recruited into a conditioning experiment designed to test how punishment affected learning. The experimenters instructed them to train ‘learners’ by administering electric shocks each time the learners made a mistake. The participants were told that the intensity of the shocks would increase, from 15 to 450 volts, according to the number of mistakes the learners made. Unbeknownst to the participants in these experiments, they were not administering real electric shocks at all. The learners were really actors pretending to make mistakes and suffer pain. Around 65 per cent of Milgram’s participants were prepared to administer what they thought were near-deadly electric shocks of 450 volts when instructed to do so by an authority figure. All participants were prepared to inflict 300-volt shocks. In a variant of the experiment, the participants were given the opportunity to observe other participants – referred to as ‘teachers’ – who refused to administer the shocks. When the participants had a chance to observe the teachers, they were less likely to obey the instructions to inflict shocks. Overall, Milgram’s experiments suggest that leaders have a strong influence on their followers, but peer pressure from others at the same level in a hierarchy can also play a role in modifying blind obedience to authority.13

  More generally, Milgram’s evidence suggests that many situations can be manipulated, by leaders or just by circumstance, so that ordinary people are led to commit egregious acts. This helps to explain why malevolent dictators and others can have so much influence over otherwise empathetic individuals. Nonetheless, we are prone to conflicts between our conscience and our instincts to obey authority.14 In later work, Milgram set out the idea that obedience reflects a tension between our autonomous states of being and our ‘agentic’ states of being. In the former, we take responsibility for our own actions. In the latter, we allow others to tell us what to do and we blame them. We lose our sense of autonomy when we become someone else’s agent and instrument, but for a leader to dominate our actions we must perceive them as a legitimate and qualified authority figure. We encourage ourselves to believe that our leaders will accept the responsibility that we have abrogated, and sometimes we blindly assume, without much foundation, that they are leading us in a just and responsible way.15

  Thinking styles in leaders and followers

  Through this book we have explored how interplays between System 1 instinct and emotion and System 2 reason and cognition drive our copycat and contrarian choices and decisions. Does this sort of dual-system processing still hold under the kind of extreme conditions and duress that Milgram’s participants experienced? Ethical constraints mean that researchers cannot easily explore these questions with real humans, so a multidisciplinary team of neuroscientists, psychologists and computer scientists from the UK, Austria and Spain found a novel way to circumvent them, using virtual reality technology and brain imaging techniques to explore the neural responses of people involved in Milgram-style experiments. Sixteen healthy adults were recruited and immersed in a virtual reality world. Just as in Milgram’s earlier experiment, the participants were instructed to administer shocks – but this time to a female avatar programmed to respond to the ‘shocks’ by mimicking human expressions of pain. If the avatar gave a correct answer to a question, the participants were instructed to press one button to indicate that they did not want to give the avatar a shock. But if the avatar gave an incorrect answer, then the participants were instructed to press another button to inflict an electric shock, no matter how painful the shock seemed to be.

  The experimenters scanned the participants’ brains using fMRI. Observing pain in the avatar did activate the participants’ amygdala, which, as we have seen in previous chapters, is commonly associated with processing aversive emotions including fear and anxiety. The activations here were consistent with the operation of some fast-thinking emotions. Were the participants sharing the avatar’s apparent fear? The perceptions of the avatar’s pain also induced responses in the participants’ prefrontal cortex, which is generally associated with higher level, slow-thinking responses. So, fast and slow thinking were working simultaneously in this virtual reality version of the Milgram experiments. Whilst the experimental team were not able specifically to assess what was driving the participants’ obedience, they were still able to ascertain that participants will persevere with instructions even when they are experiencing emotional distress themselves.16 If this evidence can be generalised to real-world experiences, then it might suggest that people’s decisions to obey the authority of their leaders, for example in following a leader’s instructions to inflict pain on others, is not an easy choice, and is associated with emotional conflicts within the psyche of the leaders’ followers.

  Students in prison

  Stanley Milgram and his team’s research is a classic of social psychology, and it inspired other social scientists to carry out a range of similar experiments with the aim of further unravelling the hierarchical relationships associated with obedience to authority. A now notorious experiment was the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which students were recruited to participate in an experiment set in a mock prison. The students were given a choice of pretending to be a guard or a prisoner. The experiment soon started to mimic reality closely. The students fell into their roles easily, with the ‘guards’ exhibiting genuinely domineering and aggressive behaviours towards the ‘prisoners’. In turn, the ‘prisoners’ adopted subservient and submissive behaviours. Everyone, prisoners and guards alike, was complicit in the destructive, antisocial behaviours exhibited by the guards, and the mock prison quickly transformed into a violent and dangerous place – even though all the student participants knew that they were just part of an experiment. Even more worryingly, the experimenters also started to lose their objectivity, rationalising the abusive behaviour of the student guards. The experiment had to be abandoned early for ethical reasons.17

  The Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrates how strong and ingrained are our tendencies to conform and immerse ourselves in the roles to which we are assigned. But context is not the only driver of dehumanising behaviours. Personality traits also play a role. As we have discussed in earlier chapters, our personalities predispose us to feeling specific emotions – for example, an anxious personality will be predisposed to feel fear. Our individual predispositions will also affect our social emotions – how we feel in social situations when we or others are being treated unfairly, for example. Social emotions will have both positive and negative dimensions, and they may also determine our inclinations to engage in antisocial behaviour. Anticipating that an analysis of personality traits would be illuminating, the prison experiment researchers asked the students to complete some personality tests before the experiment started. They found that students who had chosen to be guards were less sociable, altruistic and empathetic, and scored more highly on tests designed to capture antisocial tendencies, including Machiavellianism, aggression, authoritarianism, narcissism and social dominance.18 So, the fact that some of the students in the Stanford Prison Experiment were willing to fall into their new roles so quickly might be partly explained by students self-selecting themselves into particular roles, as determined by their predispositions and personality traits.

  Suppressing social emotions

  Emotions are important in a social context, but they can also be suppressed. Social norms may prohibit the expression of emotions, from relatively mild cultural conventions (fewer eyebrows are raised at noisy, public expressions of emotions in some cultures than others) to the extreme regulations in institutional settings such as prisons. In the latter dehumanised environments, we are more likely to follow others and obey authority figures.

  One interpretation of the Stanford Prison Experiment findings is that the students’ emotional responses were suppressed.19 Some evidence of emotional suppression comes from real-world applications of insights from the electric shock and prison experiments. Outside experimental labs, there are many examples of tyranny feeding on our instincts to obey authority, especially whe
n we ourselves face severe hardships and threats. These instincts can help to explain the perverse relationships between leaders and followers that have characterised some of the most barbaric episodes in human history, and why social emotions are suppressed in extreme environments associated with war and oppression. Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo has written extensively on obedience to authority, power relationships and their impact across a range of contexts. Zimbardo was a co-investigator on the electric shock and prison experiments described above. He was also an expert witness for the defence of American military and intelligence personnel on trial for abuses at the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq, after photographic evidence emerged in 2003 of the torture of Iraqi prisoners at the prison during the Iraq War. Abu Ghraib was a real-life corollary of the Stanford Prison Experiment, with staff operating under conditions that were gruelling and degrading. Military personnel were living under the real threat of physical retribution for disobeying authority and/or violating group norms. Zimbardo attributed the abusive behaviour of the Abu Ghraib defendants to a ‘Lucifer effect’, claiming that any of us might have the capacity to be vicious if we found ourselves in such aggressive, dehumanised environments. Most of us have the capacity to act in a way that could be judged evil by others if we are put under enough pressure. The responsibility for acting in this way is not ours alone. Our propensity to be villains (or heroes) is formed by the authority figures and contexts in which we find ourselves. In these situations, we will be driven by our instincts to obey leaders’ orders to commit ruthless acts that we would not for a moment contemplate if given the choice under different conditions. Without institutional prohibitions, and in a less degrading context, those caught up in the Abu Ghraib scandals might have behaved in a less vicious way.20 And those caught up in these dehumanised situations find ways to control their normal empathetic responses.