A college education in an Ivy League university is supposed to inculcate strong critical thinking skills and the ability for independent thought, but recent research suggests that  perhaps deep down we aren’t that different from sheep that need to be lead. Researchers from Leed University conducted an experiment where large crowds of up to 200 or more people were told to walk around in a hall randomly. Inside this crowd of people was a small percentage of individuals who were given more specific instructions with regards to where to walk. Communication was forbidden between all participants, but they were told that they had to stay within arms length of other people. The result was that in all cases, the “informed individuals” became the de-facto leaders, with the crowd following them and even forming a “self organising, snake-like structure”.

A small percentage of people were all that was needed to influence the rest of the group to follow - 5% were all that were needed to get the crowd to follow in a particular direction. This is not particularly surprising, as it is consistent with earlier theories such as Malcom Gladwell’s Tipping Point or Duncan Watts’ “No one group” rebuttal of the Tipping Point . This is, after all, the entire reason why companies spend obscene amounts of money on celebrity endorsements and trying to get the “Influentials” to spread interest in their product. What is interesting, however, is the fact that such behavior was observed even in the absence of overt communication between the participants. The leaders didn’t say “Follow me”, but everyone just started following in their wake. This is even more curious considering that there wasn’t any particular reward associated with following the leaders - there wasn’t anything to be gained from walking the way the leaders walked, no payoff matrix to observe and deduce a Nash Equilibrium from, but such “Follow the leader” behavior simply appeared in the crowd. In fact, according to the researchers, it seems that most of the people in the crowd didn’t even realise they were following anyone.

Another experiment showed a related outcome was conducted in the University of Calgary: There, researchers noticed that while working on a task, if there was someone else in close proximity doing a different job, progress on the task assigned would slow, presumably because the participants were mentally modelling themselves as doing the same task as the other person close by. Such behavior was due to our mirror neuron system, suggesting once again that overt communication was unnecessary to get others to follow in your footsteps.

I’m sure the two articles provide some comfort to all the other students out there who’ve ever struggled with their homework while their roommates are playing video games - it’s not our fault we automatically feel like playing video games too!