When pressed by your host, you take a second helping of dinner, even though you are determined to watch your weight. You may have too much to drink on a night out—more than you planned, anyway—because your friends are encouraging you.

You may go to a movie that you dislike because everyone else and the reviews recommend it. You wear the same clothes as others—partly because of the way the clothing industry copies itself, but largely because we choose to wear what other people wear. We look around—at people like us, at magazines, at films and TV—and develop a feel for what is socially acceptable and how we might put that look together.

So says Mark Earls in Herd: How to change mass behaviour by harnessing our true nature. In direct contradiction to the focus on ever-greater individuality and ever-greater granularity espoused by folks like Chris Anderson as we travel down the Long Tail, Earls suggests that we are, instead, ’super-social apes’. We survive only through crowds, collaboration, and conformity.

This is good news for marketers, who tend to be far more comfortable categorizing and classifying than creating customized, personalized, one-on-one relationships. It is also borne out by phenomena we’ve all observed: viral videos, fads, and any one of Malcolm Gladwell’s many examples of the Tipping Point.

Blogs. Twitter. Facebook. All examples of our tendency to herd and swarm, of our tendency to value momentum and jump on bandwagons.

On this blog, the focus is frequently on you, the unique individual that you are, and there is no doubt that there are many billions of unique individuals on this Earth. No matter how unique someone is, though, the fact is that there will always be commonalities amongst us. No company could survive that only appealed to one person. No person could survive without the connections to others that form the fabric of our lives.

Sam Gustin of Portfolio.com ran a piece this week on Facebook’s growing pains:

Part of the problem lies in the fundamental reason why users join online social networks in the first place. Put simply, they’re not there to buy things, they’re there to socialize.

That rationale would be termed a ‘convention’ by Charles Tilly: a commonly accepted explanation that makes no attempt to adapt itself to a particular situation. It’s quite a throwaway line. After all, as any mall owner could tell you, one of the ways we socialize is by shopping. My sister, who is a retailer, says that there’s nothing better than when groups of women come in; they egg each other on to buy more, in fact leading to a sort of competition. So what is different about online social networks?

I would suggest that the size of the group is what is in play, and here’s why: the idea that I would buy something I don’t want or need to impress a friend is pretty embarrassing, and yet it happens all the time. That doesn’t mean, however, that I want everyone else to know I did it. So the ’shopping multiplier effect’ reaches a sort of optimum level (say, four or five people) and begins to decline thereafter.

Back to the issue of whether we’re staunch individualists or dedicated herders, you may be wondering at this point if I am contradicting the entire VortexDNA message about your unique purpose, values and life focus. Fret not, friends! VortexDNA’s key point is that human intention is governed by the mathematics of complex systems. This means that human behavior is more effective when there is less friction in the system, when all molecules are moving together like the water molecules in a whirlpool. When we associate with people who share our purpose and values, this alignment increases and friction decreases, our human effectiveness goes up, and it feels good.

I don’t think the whole world should only have one set of values and that we should all be a bunch of automatons, but there is no doubt that our lives are highly adaptive to our environments and the lives of those around us. We seek to minimize the friction of the complex system by engaging in herd behavior.

Do your actions reflect the herd? Note: you will not get extra points for individualistically disagreeing with me.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 4:41 am and is filed under People matter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.