The military uses the herd mentality to achieve goals that would otherwise probably not be achievable. As a veteran, it’s no shock to me that synchronized activities among humans cause the development of a sense of loyalty.
HITLER and Mussolini both had the ability to bend millions of people to their fascist will. Now evidence from psychology and neurology is emerging to explain how tactics like organised marching and propaganda can work to exert mass mind control.
Scott Wiltermuth of Stanford University in California and colleagues have found that activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group. “It makes us feel as though we’re part of a larger entity, so we see the group’s welfare as being as important as our own,” he says.
We may all feel comfortable with the idea that herds engender loyalty among the members of the pack but why? The answer shouldn’t be much of a shock if you’ve got even the most basic understanding of the chemical concoctions that make our brains tick.
Vasily Klucharev, at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, found that the brain releases more of the reward chemical dopamine when we fall in line with the group consensus (Neuron, vol 61, p 140). His team asked 24 women to rate more than 200 women for attractiveness. If a participant discovered their ratings did not tally with that of the others, they tended to readjust their scores. When a woman realised her differing opinion, fMRI scans revealed that her brain generated what the team dubbed an “error signal”. This has a conditioning effect, says Klucharev: it’s how we learn to follow the crowd.
What would be much more interesting to me than an explanation of why humans tend to follow along with the crowd is why I tend to go against the crowd. What makes me lean towards contrarianism 90% of the time? If you can tell me that I’ll buy you a beer sometime.