Professor Jens Krause, a biology professor at University of Leeds, has found that only 5% of a moving crowd can influence the direction of the rest of the crowd.
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.
Okay, we need to recruit people to form the core 5% that will lead the rest of Western societies in the direction of developing full body rejuvenation therapies. We can do this. We just need to start signaling to everyone else that we can do this. We don't need to convince everyone. We just to get a vanguard to say this is possible and worth doing. Then the crowd will follow.
By Randall Parker at 2008 February 14 09:37 PM Brain Society | TrackBackThis shows that humans, often have an inclination to become totalitarian.
As you know, Eugene Ionesco wrote the "Rhinoceros" play, as a satire against totalitarianism and herd mentality. In this play, a rhinoceros appears in a small French town, and everybody is shocked, and many are disgusted. But gradually, as more and more rhinoceroses start appearing in the town, a lot of people gradually start liking these animals, and finally people start morphing into rhinoceroses. But at the end of the story, only one person refuses to join the majority:
Where does the assumption that what is observed for physical movement correlates in any way to ideological movement come from?
Um, let's see. I have been told to stay within arm's length of someone as has everyone else. If I pick someone arbitrarily to stay near, I have a finite chance of picking one of the leaders. I have a finite chance of picking someone who picked a leader. etc.
I wonder whether a computer model with the same requirement would perform any differently?
There`s safety in numbers. One of the arguments for why the Neanderthals became extinct,and our species survived,is that we lived in larger groups. If CERN creates a worm hole in may,linking points in space and time,and perhaps linking us with advanced human civilizations in parallel universes,then our numbers would dramatically increase,which I presume should make us safer.
I think the possibilities of rejeuventation therapies is greatly exaggerated. Is it desirable? YEsS! Does that make it probable? No.
I believe we will certainly be able to slow down aging so that a lot of people will crack 110. To some extent, this is already happening. I am not convinced that REVERSAL of aging is going to happen.
Bob gets it...simple flocking behavior. The conjectures about conformity and herd mentality, while perhaps true, don't (as we say in the herd) follow from the experiment.
If a crowded game is over and you are trying to exit the stadium then a simple rule such as going with the maximum flow is intelligent. (Better than going against the flow to use the exit by which you entered.) If you know people follow such rules, then you can improve stadium design.
Crispytoast,
Obviously I did not demonstrate that physical crowd following behavior has a correlate in intellectual crowd following behavior. But I've read evidence to that effect. For example, some political scientists claim that when people join a political party they get most of their opinions from existing party members. In other words, they don't join a party because it agrees with them on a large list of issues. They don't even have opinions on those issues. They decide that if they identify with a group then they'll adopt more of that group's beliefs.
Randall,
It seems to me that the political party example is caused more by the idea of assuming a "role" as a party member. This is a strong concept in social psychology.
They seem to have made a mistake, and their experiment doesn't support their claims. They varied crowd size, which qualifies as the independent variable only if you're doing an elaborate study of computational flocking. I posit that the independent variable should have been how much autonomy the subjects were allowed.
If this crowd experiment was executed properly, and there was no communication between people, then it proves nothing about psychology. If they wish to establish a connection with psych, then they would need a control group. Such a control could be done as Bob suggests, and flocking examples exist. Only if the results from the computational model were statistically different from the people crowd could you make a claim about human psychology. If this were the case, it would be an interesting study.
It would also be interesting to see what would happen if their artificial heuristics were removed (Stay so close to someone else, etc.). This would enable them to make a stronger case for the generality of their results.
What happens when two separate small groups within the crowd are given different instructions? If you want to make the jump from physical movement to ideological movement, this just shows that people prefer to have a sense of direction. "Wander aimlessly" is hardly a purpose. The human brain prefers patterns to randomness and will generate one when none is there or cling to a subtle one even if it is not fully aware when it does so. If only one group within the crowd had a sense of direction, then everyone eventually ends up following them. But if several people have differing senses of direction were within a crowd, the results would probably be more complex.
Bob, Fly, and Chris are misinterpreting. The leaders are the ones who had to stay within arm's length. The rest wandered according to whim. The computer model would be a failure. This is an attempt to see if there IS a "flocking rule" in operation for the rest. It seems so, though it isn't derived in any basic detail by this statistical study. The objection about "varying crowd size" is also off base. This was merely an attempt to see what % had to be informed leaders at every size category.
Brian H,
I don't know where you get that idea. It says "participants" were told to stay within arms length. Elsewhere in the article "participants" clearly refers to all participants. 'Informed individuals' refers to those participants given additional instruction.