The Herd Instinct

Abstract

Person-to-person interactions underlie many kinds of group behaviour, from panicking crowds, to clothing fads, to booms and busts in the share market. The growth of the Internet, for example, led to the dot-com bubble at the turn of the Millennium. Communication provides the glue that keeps social groups together. Peer pressure forces people to conform to group morality. New technologies are changing the ways in which people communicate and therefore the way influence spreads. They also make it possible for groups to cooperate in new ways, as highlighted by spontaneous planning during the Paris riots of 2005 and by the electronic collaboration used by groups, such as SETI@home.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.¹