visibility. If something is built to show, it’s built to grow.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF IMITATION
Imagine you’re in an unfamiliar city. You’re out of town on a business trip
or vacationing with a friend and by the time you finally land, check into the
hotel, and take a quick shower you’re famished. It’s time for dinner.
You want to go somewhere good, but you don’t know the city that well.
The concierge is busy and you don’t want to spend a lot of time reading
reviews on the Internet, so you decide to just find a place nearby.
But when you step out onto the bustling street you’re struck by dozens of
options. A cute Thai place with a purple awning. A hip-looking tapas bar.
An Italian bistro. How do you choose?
If you’re like most people you’d probably follow a time-tested rule of
thumb: look for a restaurant full of people. If lots of people are eating there,
it’s probably good. If a place is empty, you should probably keep on
walking.
This is just one example of a much broader phenomenon. People often
imitate those around them. They dress in the same styles as their friends,
pick entrées preferred by other diners, and reuse hotel towels more when
they think others are doing the same. People are more likely to vote if their
spouse votes, more likely to quit smoking if their friends quit, and more
likely to get fat if their friends become obese. Whether making trivial
choices like what brand of coffee to buy or important decisions like paying
their taxes, people tend to conform to what others are doing. Television
shows use canned laugh tracks for this reason: people are more likely to
laugh when they hear others laughing.
People imitate, in part, because others’ choices provide information.
Many decisions we make on a daily basis are like choosing a restaurant in a
foreign city, albeit with a little more information. Which one is the salad
fork again? What’s a good book to take on vacation? We don’t know the
right answer, and even if we have some sense of what to do, we’re not
entirely sure.
So to help resolve our uncertainty, we often look to what other people are
doing and follow that. We assume that if other people are doing something,
it must be a good idea. They probably know something we don’t. If our
tablemates seem to be using the smaller fork to pick at the arugula, we do
the same. If lots of people seem to be reading that new John Grisham
thriller, we buy it for our upcoming vacation.
Psychologists call this idea “social proof.” This is why baristas and
bartenders seed the tip jar at the beginning of their shift by dropping in a
handful of ones and maybe a five. If the tip jar is empty, their customers
may assume that other people aren’t really tipping and decide not to tip
much themselves either. But if the tip jar is already brimming with money,
they assume that everyone must be tipping, and thus they should tip as well.
Social proof even plays a role in matters of life and death.
Imagine one of your kidneys fails. Your body relies on this organ to filter
the toxins and waste products from your blood, but when it stops working,
your whole body suffers. Sodium builds up, your bones weaken, and you’re
at risk of developing anemia or heart disease. If not treated quickly, you will
die.
More than 40,000 people in the United States come down with end-stage
renal disease every year. Their kidneys fail for one reason or another and
they have two options: either go through time-consuming back-and-forth
visits to a treatment center three times a week for five-hour dialysis
treatments, or get a kidney transplant.
But there are not enough kidneys available for transplant. Currently more
than 100,000 patients are on the wait list; more than 4,000 new patients are
added each month. Not surprisingly, people on the wait list for a kidney are
eager to get one.
Imagine you are on that list. It is managed on a first-come, first-served
basis, and available kidneys are offered first to people at the top of the list,
who usually have been waiting the longest. You yourself have been waiting
for months for an available kidney. You’re fairly low on the list, but finally
one day you’re offered a potential match. You’d take it, right?
Clearly, people who need a kidney to save their lives should take one
when offered. But surprisingly, 97.1 percent of kidney offers are refused.
Now, many of those refusals are based on the kidney not being a good
match. In this respect, getting an organ transplant is a bit like getting your
car repaired. You can’t put a Honda carburetor in a BMW. Same with a
kidney. If the tissue or blood type doesn’t match yours, the organ won’t
work.
But when she looked at hundreds of kidney donations, MIT professor
Juanjuan Zhang found that social proof also leads people to turn down
available kidneys. Say you are the one hundredth person on the list. A
kidney would have first been offered to the first person on the list, then the
second, and so on. So to finally reach you, it must have been turned down
by ninety-nine other people. This is where social proof comes into play. If
so many others have refused this kidney, people assume it must not be very
good. They infer it is low quality and are more likely to turn it down. In
fact, such inferences lead one in every ten people who refuse a kidney to do
so in error. Thousands of patients turn down kidneys they should have
accepted. Even though people can’t communicate directly with others on
the list, they make their decisions based on others’ behavior.
—————
Similar phenomena play out all the time.
In New York City, Halal Chicken and Gyro offers delicious platters of
chicken and lamb, lightly seasoned rice, and pita bread. New York magazine
ranked it as one of the top twenty food carts in the city, and people wait up
to an hour to get one of Halal’s tasty but inexpensive meals. Go during
certain times of day and the line will stretch all the way down the block.
Now I know what you are thinking. People must wait that long because
the food is really good. And you’re partially right: the food is quite good.
But the same owners operate an almost identical food cart called Halal
Guys right across the street. Same food, same packaging, basically an
identical product. But there is no line. In fact, Halal Guys has never
developed the same devout following as its sibling. Why?
Social proof. People assume that the longer the line, the better the food
must be.
This herd mentality even affects the type of careers people consider.
Every year I ask my second-year MBA students to do a short exercise. Half
the students are asked what they thought they wanted to do with their life
right when they started the MBA program. The other half are asked what
they want to do now. Neither group gets to see the question the other was
asked and responses are anonymous.
The results are striking. Before they start the MBA program, students
have a broad range of ambitions. One wanted to reform the health care
system, another wanted to build a new travel website, and a third wanted to
get involved in the entertainment industry. Someone wanted to run for
political office and another student thought about becoming an
entrepreneur. A handful say they want to go into investment banking or
consulting. Overall, they possess a diverse set of interests, goals, and
careers paths.
The responses from students when asked what they want to do a year into
the program are much more homogeneous and concentrated. More than
two-thirds say they want to get into investment banking or consulting, with
a small sprinkling of other careers.
The convergence is remarkable. Sure, people may learn about different
opportunities during the MBA program, but part of this herding is driven by
social influence. People aren’t sure what career to choose, so they look to
others. And it snowballs. While less than 20 percent of people might have
been interested in investment banking and consulting going into the
program, that number is larger than any other career. A few people see that
20 percent and switch. A few more see those people switch, and they follow
along. Soon the number is 30 percent. Which makes other people even
more likely to switch. Soon that 20 percent has become much larger. So
through social influence this initially small advantage gets magnified.
Social interaction led students who originally preferred different paths to go
in the same direction.
Social influence has a big effect on behavior, but to understand how to
use it to help products and ideas catch on, we need to understand when its
effects are strongest. And that brings us to Koreen Johannessen.
THE POWER OF OBSERVABILITY
Koreen Johannessen started at the University of Arizona as a clinical social
worker. Originally, she was hired by the mental health group to help
students deal with problems like depression and drug abuse. But after years
of treating students, Johannessen realized that she was working on the
wrong end of the problem. Sure, she could try to fix the ongoing issues that
afflicted students, but it would be much better to prevent them before they
started. So Johannessen moved over to the campus health group and took
over health education, eventually becoming the director of health promotion
and preventive services.
As at most universities in the United States, one of the biggest issues at
Arizona was alcohol abuse. More than three-quarters of American college
students under the legal drinking age report drinking alcohol. But the bigger
concern was the quantity that students consume. Forty-four percent of
students binge-drink, and more than 1,800 U.S. college students die every
year from alcohol-related injuries. Another 600,000 are injured while under
the influence of alcohol. It’s a huge issue.
Johannessen addressed the problem head-on. She papered the campus
with flyers detailing the negative consequences of bingeing. She placed ads
in the school paper with information about how alcohol affects cognitive
functioning and performance in school. She even set up a coffin at the
student center with statistics about the number of alcohol-related deaths.
But none of these initiatives seemed to put much of a dent in the problem.
Simply educating students about the risks of alcohol didn’t seem to be
enough.
So Johannessen tried asking the students how they felt about drinking.
Surprisingly, she found that most students said they were not comfortable
with the drinking habits of their peers. Sure, they might enjoy a casual drink
once in a while, just like most adults. But they weren’t into the heavy binge
drinking they saw among other students. They spoke distastefully about the
times they nursed a hungover roommate or held someone’s hair while she
threw up in the toilet. So while their peers seemed fine with the drinking
culture, they weren’t.
Johannessen was pleased. The fact that most students were against binge
drinking seemed to bode well for eliminating the drinking problem—until
she thought about it closely.
If most students were uncomfortable with the drinking culture, then why
was it happening in the first place? Why were students drinking so much if
they don’t actually like it?
Because behavior is public and thoughts are private.
Put yourself in a college student’s situation. When you look around,
you’d see a lot of drinking. You’d see tailgates at the football games, keg
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