Switch - Chip Heath [93]
In a similar study, individuals or pairs who were completing a survey heard what sounded like a woman falling down loudly on the other side of a room divider. Of the lone bystanders, 70 percent went to help her, but only 40 percent of the pairs helped. Even when the pairs helped, they acted more slowly than the individuals.
Why do groups fail to respond as well as individuals?
In ambiguous situations—smoke pouring into a room, the apparent sound of a fall—people look to others for cues about how to interpret the event. If you see a man suddenly collapse at the mall, your brain races through possible interpretations: It’s a heart attack! Or, wait, maybe he tripped and fell down. Or what if he’s playing a gag on someone? You’re reluctant to rush over immediately, because if he simply tripped, your alarm-bell behavior will leave you both embarrassed.
If you’re the only person around to react, you’ll probably make your best guess—heart attack—and rush over. But if there’s a crowd, you’ve got two stimuli to process: the collapse itself and the crowd’s reaction to the collapse. You might pause briefly to study the crowd. Are other people acting like he’s had a heart attack? You stand there, idling, ready to spring into action at the first sign of crisis. But as you wait, other people are looking back at you, and when they see you idling, your behavior becomes data for their theory that it’s not an emergency. And that’s why three people can sit in a room filling with smoke and not make a peep.
We all talk about the power of peer pressure, but “pressure” may be overstating the case. Peer perception is plenty. In this entire book, you might not find a single statement that is so rigorously supported by empirical research as this one: You are doing things because you see your peers do them. It’s not only your body-pierced teen who follows the crowd. It’s you, too. Behavior is contagious. Let’s take a quick epidemiological tour of behavior.
We start with a mind-blowing finding: Obesity is contagious. A groundbreaking study led by Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School, which followed 12,067 people for thirty-two years, found that when someone became obese, the odds of that person’s close mutual friends becoming obese tripled! Remarkably, proximity didn’t seem to matter. Obesity seemed to “spread” between friends even when they were in different parts of the country. In explaining these findings, Dr. Christakis said, “You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you.”
Drinking is contagious. A study showed that when college males were paired with a dormitory roommate who drank frequently in high school, they saw their GPAs go down by a quarter point on average. There’s an endless list of other behaviors that are contagious, as well: marriage; shaking hands to greet someone; wearing fashionably fluffy boots; and investing in Google. And you might want to avoid hanging around with baseball players, lest you start compulsively spitting.
It’s clear that we imitate the behaviors of others, whether consciously or not. We are especially keen to see what they’re doing when the situation is unfamiliar or ambiguous. And change situations are, by definition, unfamiliar! So if you want to change things, you have to pay close attention to social signals, because they can either guarantee a change effort or doom it.
When you’re leading an Elephant on an unfamiliar path, chances are it’s going to follow the herd. So how do you create a herd?
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The Elephant constantly looks to the herd for cues about how to behave. This is why baristas and bartenders seed their tip jars—they’re trying to send signals about the “norm” of the herd. It’s a time-honored tactic. In fact, opera companies used to plant stooges in the audience to laugh and applaud at the appropriate times. (If that seems quaint, remember that the “stooges” are alive and well on the laugh tracks of your favorite sitcom.)
But sometimes social cues are hidden. For