Three recent papers cited a 2009 Herding in humans paper, starting with a 2024 modeling study by one of its coauthors showing that people have trouble purposefully acting randomly:
“In many tasks, human behavior is far noisier than is optimal. Yet when asked to behave randomly, people are typically too predictable.
Randomness is produced by inhibition of habitual behavior, striving for unpredictability. We verify these predictions in two experiments: people show the same deviations from randomness when randomly generating from non-uniform or recently-learned distributions.
While local sampling has previously explained why people are unpredictable in standard cognitive tasks, here it also explains why human random sequences are not unpredictable enough.”
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011739 “Explaining the flaws in human random generation as local sampling with momentum”
A 2023 study tested extents to which people could be influenced to change their food preferences:
“We examined the effect of a descriptive norm on the choice between two similar products (vegetables or fruits). Participants were exposed to a norm promoting vegetables, fruits, or no norm.
A descriptive norm signaling that a greater proportion of previous participants had chosen a vegetable over a generally preferred fruit basket tripled the odds of participants choosing vegetables. These findings support the concept that descriptive norms act as heuristics that influence behavior in a relatively automatic manner.
The norm may have acted as a social proof heuristic to which participants conformed with little deliberation. Given that they were asked to add their name to a list of previous participants’ names and choices, they may have inferred that their choice would be visible to participants after them.
We found no to small effects of norms on intentions to consume fruits and vegetables or on taste expectations and experiences in a taste test, suggesting that these may not be key in explaining how descriptive norms lead to behavior change. Although the fruit norm did not affect choice, it did reduce negative fruit taste experiences compared to the no norm group.”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15534510.2023.2261178 “I’ll have what they’re having: a descriptive social norm increases choice for vegetables in students”
I selected this 2023 modeling study from many other modeling studies because it provided details about what researchers consider herding’s underlying premises to be:
“Herding does not come about because a central actor tells the agents to herd, but rather it is an emergent phenomenon of many local decisions, wherein the beliefs and thoughts of individuals become aligned. Herding is a form of social contagion, where one individual adopts the views of another, primarily because it increases their confidence in a decision they were making.
Herding is related to conformity, an important behavior in humans’ social learning, being a tendency to act as the majority of the individuals do. Conformity is defined as choosing the most frequent strategy observed by the player, instead of being guided by maximizing their personal payoffs.
The cost of herding occurs when someone decides to make the opposite decision of the rest of the herd. It is important to realize that these costs are only incurred if the actor has adopted a herd mentality. If they do not care about the herd, they do not suffer social costs.
In cases where everyone is herding, cooperation will prevail. Having a herding mentality has a positive overall effect, and can explain why cooperation prevails even without altruism, kin selection, tags, and reciprocity.”
https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(23)02004-7 “The evolution and social cost of herding mentality promote cooperation”
I’d guess that these coauthors never told their children that wrong is wrong even when everyone else is doing it.
It made me laugh that both the 2009 paper and this paper defined herding as solely happening on its own without any herders’ involvement. I have no doubts that researchers are not allowed to investigate and/or publish factual evidence on more advanced techniques of herding humans, especially those that have been widely used during this decade.
Surface Your Real Self 