How - Dov Seidman [6]
You could turn to the people around you and say, “Listen, I’m a lot bigger than you, and if you don’t get up when I say so I’m gonna punch you out.” Your impressive display of brute force might get some people to follow you. Coercing by fear, however, is limited in its reach. You might get local buy-in, but the people three sections over or across the stadium probably feel securely remote from your threats, and will likely continue to do as they please, which may include simply leaving. The pumped-up bicep and snarling tone inspire little beyond a desire to flee. More important to your vision: If they do comply, with what gusto will they stand up? To create a great and powerful Wave, one that can make a difference to your team, you need enthusiastic participation. Threatened, will they leap up or, in a state of reluctant acquiescence to your superior brawn, get up slowly? Will it be a glorious Wave or a so-so Wave?
Having ruled out money as a motivator and force as a coercer, your best option to reach out to the strangers around you is probably verbal communication (although you are basically strangers, you are united in a common activity of watching the game, so you do start from a place of common interest). So what do you say and, more important, how do you say it? Again, you have some options. You could think, “Information is power. The more information I control, the greater my advantage over these other fans.” You have a vision and you don’t want anyone to steal it, so you turn to the next guy and say, “I’m going to ask you to do something, but I can’t tell you why; it’s on a need-to-know basis. Trust me.” By playing your cards close to your chest, of course, you ask a bunch of people to risk making fools of themselves—or worse, engage in a waving and screaming activity that makes no sense to them—on the word of someone they hardly know. Krazy George may have built up enough personal capital from three years of banging that drum at Oakland As games to pull it off, but few others in the stadium have, and even George runs the risk of encountering a bunch of newbies from out of town who think he’s just another Northern California nut job with a drum. If you try it, people will probably think, “How do I know this is going to work? Why should I trust him?” Your CIA operative approach will do little to allay suspicions of your motivations.
So you think, perhaps, it might be more effective to share your vision with the other fans. Maybe a PowerPoint presentation on the Jumbotron explaining the complex and fascinating physics of human interaction that form a Wave would win you converts:
Hungarian Research3 Shows That the Wave:
• Usually rolls clockwise.
• Is 6 to 12 meters wide (average-15 seats).
• Moves about 12 meters (20 seats) per second.
• Is generated by no more than a few dozen people.
• Acquires a stable, near-linear shape as it expands through the crowd.
Credit: Vladimir Rys/Staff, Alcmannia Aachen v Borussia Monchcngladbach, 2006.
Probability of Wave
Well-established approaches to the theoretical interpretation of excitable media can be generalized to include human social behavior. By analogy with models of excitable media, people are regarded as excitable units.
• Units are activated by an external stimulus—a distance- and direction-weighted concentration of nearby active people exceeding a threshold value (c).
• Once activated, each unit follows the same set of internal rules to pass through the active (standing and waving)