Webloggin » Like Sheep

We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all. — Isaiah 53:6

After just a few centuries, science is finally catching up. Most impressive.

Have you ever arrived somewhere and wondered how you got there? Scientists at the University of Leeds believe they may have found the answer, with research that shows that humans flock like sheep and birds, subconsciously following a minority of individuals.

Results from a study at the University of Leeds show that it takes a minority of just five per cent to influence a crowd’s direction – and that the other 95 per cent follow without realising it.

The findings could have major implications for directing the flow of large crowds, in particular in disaster scenarios, where verbal communication may be difficult. “There are many situations where this information could be used to good effect,” says Professor Jens Krause of the University’s Faculty of Biological Sciences. “At one extreme, it could be used to inform emergency planning strategies and at the other, it could be useful in organising pedestrian flow in busy areas.”

Dr. Krause is in some great company here. Of course, in his case, he either got a grant for this work or he is in a position to possibly get one later…probably both of those. So he could be just speaking as a pragmatist. But millions of people in his country and in mine see no down-side to this at all.

I’m one of the weird old guys who are hard-pressed to realize any advantage in it.

If Creation stands firm as fact and evolution is a myth, this is surely the work of Satan. If evolution is to triumph over Creation, then this is a relic of a bygone era when our needs were different, and will bring us nothing but pain and misery now.

Oh yes — I do understand, in urban areas where people congregate within a few square miles by the millions of noses, to exploit this attribute would make us all much easier to manage. Hey good luck with that. We all wanted to grow up to be that when we were little kids, right? Sounds like something you’d see in one of those Monster.com commercials: “When I grow up, I want to stay mediocre by always doing things the easy way.” Except this is an aspiration to be the machinery managed by those everlastingly-ordinary, easy-out managers.

Professor Krause, with PhD student John Dyer, conducted a series of experiments where groups of people were asked to walk randomly around a large hall. Within the group, a select few received more detailed information about where to walk. Participants were not allowed to communicate with one another but had to stay within arms length of another person.

The findings show that in all cases, the ‘informed individuals’ were followed by others in the crowd, forming a self-organising, snake-like structure. “We’ve all been in situations where we get swept along by the crowd,” says Professor Krause. “But what’s interesting about this research is that our participants ended up making a consensus decision despite the fact that they weren’t allowed to talk or gesture to one another. In most cases the participants didn’t realise they were being led by others.”

Other experiments in the study used groups of different sizes, with different ratios of ‘informed individuals’. The research findings show that as the number of people in a crowd increases, the number of informed individuals decreases. In large crowds of 200 or more, five per cent of the group is enough to influence the direction in which it travels. The research also looked at different scenarios for the location of the ‘informed individuals’ to determine whether where they were located had a bearing on the time it took for the crowd to follow.

It does impress me as some interesting research. Research into what is decidedly a human weakness, from my point of view, since you can’t rely on your internal aptitudes and follow the crowd at the same time — those are mutually exclusive. And if you don’t rely on your internal aptitudes, you’re derelict in taking ownership of whatever quandary is confronting you at the time. You can’t be a sheep and a shepherd.

Some things I’d like to know:

1. How was it established that in “large crowds of 200 or more, five per cent of the group is enough to influence the direction”? Does that mean what I think it means? It reads like in a group of 50 or 100, you need more than five percent, but the researchers found the critical-ratio dwindled as the critical-mass was reached. Which would necessarily mean their research involved an exhaustive exploration of both success and failure. And if that is the case, sometimes the “don’t know where they’re going people” won out over the “know where they’re going” people, and what we’re reading is the result of the diligent scrutinizing in an effort to find patterns in numbers and proportion. If that’s all true, this is fascinating, and almost certainly the product of an evolutionary trait.

2. Did they do the research after issuing mirrored or dark sunglasses to the participants? Probably not. But if eyeballs are visible, you can’t truly say “they weren’t allowed to talk or gesture to one another.” Actually, this would short-circuit nearly all the speculation in my Point #1. It would mean what the researchers really learned, all boils down to this: When you don’t know where you’re going, once it gets really crowded you follow people who look like they know where they’re going, perhaps without realizing it.

3. Any plans to repeat this experiment after introducing geographic diversity? That would be a cornucopia of scientific learnin’s, it seems to me. Geology. Sociology. Psychology. Anthropology. My girlfriend, for example, will tell me about some silly bollywonkers law out in New York State, and I’ll be shocked by it…one phrase I like to use on her is “Vehicle inspections…turnpikes…is your side of the country the one where they threw that tea into the harbor? Because I think you guys need to do it again.” It exasperates her because she knows there is truth in it — there is territory of individuality, of collectivism, and there is movement in both of those. This animosity toward individual characterization and achievement, does have geographic movement to it…kind of like an ocean current…or the snaky tendrils of some loathsome, evil leviathan being. Science would be doing a lot of good for us, and for itself, by gathering research with that in mind. By looking at collectivism as the form of pollution that it is, and researching how we have coexisted with it in times past, how it threatens us now, and the irrational impulse many millions of us have to cling to it, essentially avoiding full maturity.

[Discuss this article with MKFreeberg over at House of Eratosthenes...]

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