Any society is always, to one degree or another, like a crowd.
There is such a concept - "crowd psychology" A crowd is always more aggressive than the individual people who make it up, it always gives in easily to emotions, it is not able to soberly assess the situation. The crowd never talks, and therefore it is easy to push her to some kind of mass actions - protest, condemnation, and simply rebellion. It costs nothing to raise her to fight, to the barricades. This property of the crowd has always been used and is used by numerous leaders striving for power and those already in power, politicians, and “bawlers-leaders”. They learned to easily turn the crowd in the direction they needed, pulling them by the “strings” of emotions, lightly pressing on sore spots...
There are no individuals in the crowd but there is only a multi-headed, but at the same time brainless creature, an energy monster, acting “according to the requests” of calculating “singers”.
Strange as it may seem, even with very intelligent people, things that seem inexplicable at first glance happen: finding themselves, for example, at a rally, they suddenly, succumbing to the general mood, begin to chant along with everyone else: “We demand!.. We protest.” ! Then, left alone and slightly coming to his senses, such a person suddenly realizes in horror that he has absolutely no idea who these “we” are, on whose behalf he so decisively demanded and protested. After all, he has his personal “I” - and this personal “I” just doesn’t want to demand or protest.
Many people know what it is « herd mentality» . This is when, seeing people running, a person passing by on his business suddenly unconsciously, for no apparent reason, joins them. This means the same thing: he falls under the influence of someone else’s program and something like the following is imprinted in his subconscious: everyone is running, which means I need to too. There were cases when a person in such a state, without having time to come to his senses, jumped onto a train that was completely unnecessary for him, and then gnawed at his elbows, not knowing how to get home now. And during the times of universal queues (which we all happily forgot about), situations more than once occurred when people stood in line for hours to buy things they absolutely did not need, just because “everyone took it.”
Crowd psychology, submission to energy large quantity people - a direct road to illness, the development of anger, negativism, as well as to false aspirations, to a meaningless pastime and to a thousand other human misfortunes. The pattern of disease development if you succumb to someone else’s programming is very simple. For example, older people often fall for this bait. For example, someone strongly suggests that this is no longer young man that the government is full of thieves. He did not have the opportunity to verify this personally, but for some reason he takes the word of the person who said it. He believes - or rather, is forced to believe - because he was consciously encoded, programmed. And it was done like this: from the lower chakras of the suggestive person, this hypnotizing information was thrown into the upper chakras of the “processed” citizen. The information received meets with an emotional response from the old man, these negative emotions begin not only to spill out onto other people through his upper chakras, but also to distort the normal energy flow his own body. He, succumbing to suggestion, begins to get nervous, angry - and gets a heart attack.
Here's another example: you were rude in transport. You responded in kind, that is, you were rude in response. What have you done? That's right again worked according to someone else's program. All the boor needed was to provoke your anger, to encourage you to burst out with emotions in order to “eat” your energy. And you obediently “fed” the boor, did what he expected from you (energy vampirism...). He has brought you under his influence. And you obediently succumbed, thereby recognizing its significance, its ability to influence people, to evoke emotions in them.
Accustomed to responding to rudeness with rudeness, you, in turn, “turn on” the emotions of other people in the same way. And you yourself don’t understand why you always get involved in some kind of squabbles, why you meet only boors and rude people on your way, why do you always have to quarrel with someone? Yes because already you yourself, being infected with someone else’s boorish energy, strengthen this impulse and you launch a new cascade of reactions in a circle, you begin to splash out the charge sitting inside you into the surrounding space. And at this time, at the level of consciousness, you form a clear program: all people are boors. And this program is already creeping out of your lower chakras, forcing those around you to run away in fear, because they feel that you see them as enemies, or, conversely, those around you begin to perceive you as an enemy and attack.
This is how anger towards the whole world can arise. A person begins to see everything in dark tones. He doesn't notice the good, but sees only evil in everything. Such a person ultimately simply drowns in this stream of evil, not noticing that he himself strengthens this stream many times over. The normal flow of energy stops. A person breaks away from the energy of Space and Earth and begins to “cook” in the same harmful emissions and finally exhausts himself. As a rule, the result is - incurable disease and death.
Why can even the most inveterate teetotaler become an alcoholic if he gets into a drinking company? For the same reason: when everyone drinks, it is difficult for one to resist everyone else; the energy of the desire to drink overwhelms him too. People also often become drug addicts “for company.” You now know how this happens - this very company catches a person in energy networks, subjugates him against his will to his desires.
How many times does it happen that we don’t want to go on a visit, but we go because they drag us there? And then we sit all evening, worrying about these people who are uninteresting to us from boredom, getting angry with ourselves that we are wasting time (after all, we were going to spend it on something else that is much more important to us). Usually people attribute such inexplicable actions to weakness of will and lack of strength of character. People don’t know that the energy networks of other people’s desires, aspirations, thoughts, emotions can be so strong that even strong-willed person, if he does not know how to consciously get rid of it, it can be very difficult to cope with them.
Incredible harm is done to personal karma, because there is nothing worse than false, externally imposed desires. Children suffer the most - as not yet established creatures, not yet able to resist the influence of the crowd. Children's drug addiction has become so widespread not because teenagers want to go into a drug haze from the hopelessness of life, but because the same herd feeling is triggered: everyone has already tried it, but am I a redhead or not as cool as them? Exactly at adolescence I have a very strong desire to be like everyone else. And of course, a teenager easily falls into harmful networks energy connections with a mass of his own kind, because his own energy-informational essence still speaks very quietly, and the demands of his own kind sound imperious and rude, like an order.
This is why teenage gangs arise so easily. Teenagers instinctively feel that, having united, they will form a new animated energy structure that will have much greater power than each of them individually. Alone, they find it difficult to cope with difficult situations. life situations, with difficult living conditions, it is difficult to resist the community of adults, which is also thoroughly permeated with pathological connections. Therefore, in order to somehow exist, they flock into flocks and, like pack animals, lose their individual mind and gain a collective mind. At the same time, they feel that as long as they are together, everyone will be afraid of them, they will get away with anything. After all, they are single organism, monolith, energy monster. That is why they believe that they can behave aggressively, brazenly, and bully passers-by. And if you try to approach, you will fly away, hitting this powerful energy wall.
Teenagers, of course, do not suspect that in doing so they are spoiling their karma, life and destiny, abandoning their own energy-informational essence, completely subordinating themselves to alien programs, emotions and desires imposed from outside. And if they are deprived of the “pack”, the powerful energy structure that is the gang is divided into its component parts, then not a trace will remain of this power and only pitiful, weak and downtrodden creatures will appear before our eyes.
Why do people have a herd mentality?
The expression “herd mentality” is figurative, not scientific. Strictly speaking, it is in itself exhaustive. If we want to say that people behave like animals in a herd, we say that they have a herd mentality. This must be understood to mean that if they did not have a herd feeling, they would behave differently and be less like animals in a herd.
Anyone who bothers to type the phrase “herd mentality” into an Internet search engine will instantly find the same text about the “5 percent law” posted on dozens of websites and dozens of blogs. This indicates that the law is empirically valid: the network herd behaves like a herd, repeating stories about the herd. This, in fact, could be the end of it, but some ambiguities remain.
First of all, we do not know well enough, at least in terms social science whether animals in herds are subject to the same herd feeling that we suppose in people. Of course, there are many surprising cases of synchronization that can be found.
There is such a thing as auto-sync.
The essence is this - if in some community 5% percent are committed simultaneously specific action- the rest of the majority begins to repeat. The theory can also be called DOTU - Enough general theory management.
If in a peacefully grazing herd of horses you frighten 5% of the individuals and “let them run away,” then the rest of the herd will take off; if even 5% of fireflies accidentally flash simultaneously, then there will immediately be a flash of the whole meadow.
This feature also appears in humans. Recently, English scientists conducted an experiment: in a large, spacious hall invited people and gave them the task “move as you please.” And some were given a clearly defined task of exactly how to move and when. Thus, it was experimentally confirmed that 5% of people moving with specific purpose can cause the whole multitude to move in the same direction.
How to understand whether it is a herd society or not?
Let us imagine a certain number of people who are together and together acting people. I say “acting” because we can only observe actions, and can only guess about the experiences and feelings accompanying them.
So, we see people together, but is it always a “herd”? Is one hundred people sitting in a cinema hall or a waiting room at a train station a herd? And what about the same hundred people seated in the cabin of the plane? - No? - What if the plane shakes and they are overcome with horror? What if they landed safely, but are crowding around the exit, not listening to the admonitions of the staff? But what about the rallies that have attracted so much attention in our time? Do those who take part in them have a herd mentality? - I'm afraid the answer to this last question depends on political position an observer who is ready to deny those who are unpleasant to him the ability of reflection, intelligence and civic consciousness.
Is it nevertheless possible to discern some meaning in discussions about the herd? - Apparently, yes. For example, Elias Canetti in famous book“Mass and Power” made many important comments on this matter. I will quote a few of them. Here's the first one:
“The desire of people to multiply has always been strong. However, this word should not be understood as a simple desire to be fruitful. People wanted there to be more of them now, in this specific place, at this very moment. The large number of herds they hunted and the desire to multiply eigenvalue uniquely intertwined in their souls. They expressed their feelings in a certain state general excitement, which I call a rhythmic or convulsive mass."
“But how do they compensate for the lack of numbers? What is especially important here is that each of them does the same as the others, each stomps in the same way as the other, each waves his arms, each makes the same head movements. This equivalence of participants, as it were, branches out into the equivalence of each member. Everything that is mobile in a person acquires special life- each leg, each hand lives on its own. Individual members are reduced to a common denominator.”
For example, when a performance has begun in a theater or a movie is being watched in a cinema, latecomers are greeted with slight hostility. Like an orderly herd, people sit quietly and endlessly patiently, and no one will reprimand someone who is late, because this is at least a “thankless task.” But everyone is well aware of their own separate relation to the one who interfered with his lateness and his unpunctuality. But time passes, everyone quietly contemplates the action of the picture from the stage or on the screen. And at some point, from seeing a funny scene of actors, a comic situation is created, people begin to smile and laugh.
It is important to understand that each person’s humor is different, or rather the perception of humor is different.
But most people in the room will somehow start laughing and smiling along with everyone else. In this case, the herd feeling and herd society can be used “with caution.”
The example above is proof of this. Especially if you are in a company of friends, and one of your acquaintances told a “not very funny” joke or story, he himself laughs and you smile - not from a herd feeling, but because you do not want to offend or embarrass your comrade.
Let's remember schools and universities. You should not create groups of more than 20 people. 20 people / 100% * 5% = 1 - this unit is the leader, and an increase in the number of people entails a loss of control. In a classroom of 30-40 people, it will be very difficult for a teacher to set the tone of the lesson and constantly keep the group’s attention. This law can be applied to other situations, try it, but don’t rely on it completely. Nothing is absolute.
Often, many people use this phenomenon for selfish purposes, starting rumors, for example, that in a couple of days some goods will disappear and 5% of those who are scared and run to buy these goods will be enough to stir up the rest and after a while the shelves will really become empty. 5% of provocateurs are enough to turn a peaceful rally into a massacre.
Each of you can feel this fine line and find masses of examples of herd behavior of people in society. And it is very important not to get confused.
When forming public opinion, the herd principle is often used. This is becoming more and more noticeable, most people don’t think about it, and just do it like everyone else. And if everyone says that the iPhone is cool, then everyone buys an iPhone. This is especially true in a situation that is unfamiliar to a person; if you don’t know what to do, you will most likely follow the others. How can you use herd mentality in sales?
Herd mentality from a marketing perspective
In marketing, many things are based on the herd mentality of people. It is very indicative of how quickly Russians absorbed Western values and culture. In just 20 years since the collapse Soviet Union, we have taken over a huge layer Western traditions, and it is actively used by marketers to increase sales. No one is surprised that the population now celebrates Halloween or St. Patrick's Day by drinking whiskey and eating at McDonald's. Such examples infinite set, but the question is how did we get here?
A big role here was played by foreign films and TV series that penetrated our television, and new ones managed to grow on them. In addition, Western corporations entered our market and began actively advertising their products in the Russian media. Many market segments simply could not withstand competition with Western manufacturers, since the quality of foreign goods is incomparably higher, for example, the automotive industry. The herd mentality did the rest; the population very quickly adjusted to new values.
Role of the pack leader
When it comes to a pack, what immediately comes to mind is that a pack must have a leader. important aspect In the life of any mass of people, the leader shapes the opinions of others. There is a leader in any group of people and if you want to control the herd mentality of the population, you need control over the leaders. The essence of the pack is that the leader can achieve faith in any truth. If you go deeper into history, you can recall many examples when the leader of a state introduced the craziest ideas into the population: fascism in Germany, the extermination of sparrows in China, etc.
Wars for territory are over, in the 21st century there will be wars for resources. The planet's main resource this moment, this is not oil or gas. The main resource is consumers, that is, you and me. The more consumers you have, the more you can earn from them. This is why Facebook shares are so expensive; this social network influences the opinions of millions of people around the world.
How to use herd mentality for sales
How can you use the herd mentality to increase sales of your product? Let's start with the fact that it is important for you to know where your target audience lives - websites, forums, social groups. networks, what TV channels they watch, where they spend their time, etc. The audience may be in the most unusual places, it’s important to spend time and find them. The larger your advertising budget, the larger the audience you can reach. The largest brands sponsor various events, football clubs, and use advertising in films. But even with small budget you can achieve a lot.
After you have found the “habitat” of your customers, you need to identify leaders who are ready to help you promote your product, of course you will need to pay for this. Your task is to make sure that the client does not just offer your product, but uses it himself or says that he uses it.
An important point in promoting a product through herd mentality is the need to make your product visible during use. That is, if your clients themselves should be walking advertisements. The first aspect is to make sure that your product is different from the others, that is, it has recognition, for example: no one will confuse a Coca-Cola bottle with anything else. The second task is to make sure that people see that the client is using your product. This is not always easy, because not all things are visible. Some are for home use, some are not visible. If the product cannot be seen, then the client must talk about it. Naturally, he needs to be motivated to do this; launching word of mouth is not always easy, but if it is launched, then there will be no problems with clients.
The story about a pack of cigarettes is very telling. Previously, you could get a cigarette without taking the pack out of your pocket, and no one could see what brand of cigarettes you smoked. In order for a person to take out a pack, the current system was invented. And now every person advertises their cigarettes without even knowing it.
We use social networks
Internet in general and social media in particular, they are an indispensable tool for attracting customers. The main advantage of using global network- this is an opportunity to influence target audience. For example, if you need to promote diapers, all you need to do is find groups and sites where parents share their experiences. Then you can negotiate with users directly or use special exchanges (for example: advego), where you can buy posts on forums.
Herd feeling. What is it? This is what makes people, especially teenagers, do things because “other people are doing it.” Sometimes acts committed under the influence of the company surrounding a teenager are unacceptable and even socially dangerous.
Let's try to get to the heart of this phenomenon. What exactly pushes teenagers to do “like everyone else”? The desire to show that he is no worse? Or maybe just wondering: why is everyone doing this? I believe that each of these reasons has an impact in individual cases.
Conducted on this topic Scientific research. For example, in a group of 200 people or more, only 5% of the “leaders” are enough for everyone else to succumb to the herd mentality over time. In groups of 50 to 150 people, 2% of “leaders” is sufficient. In smaller groups there is only one person. Of course, these boundaries are very conditional and it is impossible to give a full guarantee that with a sufficient number or even an excess (relative to the data given) of the so-called “information minority” (a group of people or a person who has leadership qualities and having confidence in themselves from the “crowd”) there will even be a partial effect.
The leaders of many campaigns achieve their “positions” precisely because of this phenomenon. It is enough to enlist the support of a small number of people to soon gain control over the rest. Also, anyone who falls into the “herd” quickly becomes part of it, because “he is no worse.”
There are people for whom the herd feeling exists only at the level of fact: it exists, but these people are not subject to it. Often these are people with leadership inclinations who have not found or are not looking for their herd. If there is already one such person nearby, and even more so as part of a group, the formation of a herd becomes tens of times more difficult, and in some cases simply impossible. Those who fall under herd influence pay attention to this “loner” and think: “Well, I do like everyone else... Why should I do like him (or all of them, if there are several loners), because he doesn’t do what everyone else does, but what he WANTS. He begins to see that it is not necessary to be part of this society, that one can be truly an individual.
What can a man from the herd do? For all. Depends on the morals, imagination and skills of the leader. Moral: what lengths is the leader himself willing to go to, because not every person will decide, for example, to commit a crime and many will limit themselves to hooliganism at most. Fantasy: whatever the leader can come up with that does not go beyond the scope of his morality, he can instill in the minds of his followers. Skills consist of authority (which in most cases is undeniable) and the extent to which the leader owns oratory, after all, even though people formed a herd, the brains still remained. You have to be able to show the crowd that something is done for a reason. A leader who is “well” proficient in all three skills (absence of the first and presence of the rest in large quantities) is capable of leading people to murder. However, if all three qualities are present, the “herd” will most likely be directed towards good deeds or simply a useless existence: so as not to interfere with society.
Together with the LookAtMe website, we have launched, in which we ask our scientists to answer questions that are quite simple, at first glance, but controversial issues readers. For you, we have selected the most interesting answers from PostNauka experts.The expression “herd mentality” is figurative, not scientific. Strictly speaking, it is in itself exhaustive. If we want to say that people behave like animals in a herd, we say that they have a herd mentality. This must be understood to mean that if they did not have a herd feeling, they would behave differently and be less like animals in a herd. Anyone who bothers to type the phrase “herd mentality” into an Internet search engine will instantly find the same text about the “5 percent law” posted on dozens of websites and dozens of blogs. This indicates that the law is empirically valid: the network herd behaves like a herd, repeating stories about the herd. This, in fact, could be the end of it, but some ambiguities remain.
First of all, we do not know well enough, at least in social scientific terms, whether animals in herds are subject to the same herd mentality that we assume in humans. Of course, there are many surprising cases of synchronization that can be found. Several years ago, one of my colleagues at the CFS conceived a whole study on the rhythmic synchronization of applause. But this was not about herd feeling: animals do not give applause. However, this is not the most difficult thing. The bad thing is that the “herd feeling” can turn out to be both a qualifying feature and an explanatory principle.
Let us imagine a certain number of people who are together and act together. I say “acting” because we can only observe actions, and can only guess about the experiences and feelings accompanying them. So, we see people together, but is it always a “herd”? Is one hundred people sitting in a cinema hall or a waiting room at a train station a herd? And what about the same hundred people seated in the cabin of the plane? - No? - What if the plane shakes and they are overcome with horror? What if they landed safely, but are crowding around the exit, not listening to the admonitions of the staff? But what about the rallies that have attracted so much attention in our time? Do those who take part in them have a herd mentality? “I’m afraid the answer to this last question depends on the political position of the observer, who is ready to deny those who are unpleasant to him the ability of reflection, intelligence and civic consciousness.
It was in relation to the masses that it was tempting to talk about herd feelings, but the scheme did not add up. The fact is that “herd” in relation to intelligence is not just “animal” in relation to human, but also evolutionarily lower in relation to a higher one. And if so, then a rejection of evolutionism was required, that is, from the idea that historical development goes in an ascending manner, towards increasing rationality of individuals. But if such an idea of linear evolution is not suitable, then the understanding of the “herd” as lower and condemned is also difficult to maintain as value judgment. And if we take the point of view of “transition to mass society”, then in a number of cases it will be appropriate to speak (as Erns Jünger did in the early 1930s) about the decline of the masses.
Is it nevertheless possible to discern some meaning in discussions about the herd? - Apparently, yes. For example, Elias Canetti in his famous book “Mass and Power” made many important comments on this matter. I will quote a few of them. Here is the first: “The desire of people to multiply has always been strong. However, this word should not be understood as a simple desire to be fruitful. People wanted more of them now, in this particular place, at this very moment. The large number of herds they hunted and the desire to increase their own numbers were peculiarly intertwined in their souls. They expressed their feeling in a certain state of general excitement, which I call a rhythmic or convulsive mass.” Canetti further explains this using the example of movements in a general dance: “But how do they compensate for the lack of numbers? What is especially important here is that each of them does the same as the others, each stomps in the same way as the other, each waves his arms, each makes the same head movements. This equivalence of participants, as it were, branches out into the equivalence of each member. Everything that is mobile in a person acquires a special life - each leg, each hand lives on its own. Individual members are reduced to a common denominator.”
The start time and the very presence of spectators in the seats. Latecomers are greeted with mild hostility. Like an orderly herd, people sit quietly and endlessly patient. But everyone is well aware of his separate existence; he counted and noted who was sitting next to him. Before the performance begins, he calmly observes the rows of assembled heads: they give him a pleasant, but unobtrusive feeling of density. The equality of the audience consists, in fact, only in the fact that everyone gets the same thing from the stage.” (Quotations are given in translation by L. G. Ionin: Canetti E. Mass and Power. M.: Ad Marginem, 1997, according to the online version). Descriptive precision should not blind us to explanatory complexity. The co-presence of many fundamentally identical, in in this case bodies, the transition from the fear of contact with strangers to some bodily self-identification with others, the rhythm of movement and the peace of togetherness allow us to speak of the current and predictable characteristics of this gathering as a herd. This is exactly how the logical construction of the events taking place here is structured for the observer. But the question of feeling remains open. As for me, I would use the word “herd” itself with caution, and I would not use the combination “herd feeling” at all.