PinkOnBrown Webzine

Recent studies by the University of Leeds has shown that people act like flocks of sheep or birds - allowing themselves to be led by a small percentage (5%) of individuals.

Results from a study at the University of Leeds show that it takes a minority of just five per cent to influence a crowd’s direction - and that the other 95 per cent follow without realising it.
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Other experiments in the study used groups of different sizes, with different ratios of ‘informed individuals’. The research findings show that as the number of people in a crowd increases, the number of informed individuals decreases. In large crowds of 200 or more, five per cent of the group is enough to influence the direction in which it travels. The research also looked at different scenarios for the location of the ‘informed individuals’ to determine whether where they were located had a bearing on the time it took for the crowd to follow.

This is an interesting study - especially since just a few days earlier a study was released that showed that people are easily led by other individuals - even when they know a better way.

Even more striking, even when we are shown a faster route, we prefer to stick with the old one and tell others to take the long road too, a finding that could have lethal implications when it comes to evacuating a building or ship in an emergency.

“These results parallel similar findings in ants and fish, and show that very simple processes can underlie human behaviour” commented Dr Simon Reader of Utrecht University, who reports the findings today in the journal Biology Letters.

This of course leads my mind to the Milgram experiment. This was a famous social psychology experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram in which he found, surprisingly, that 65% of his subjects, ordinary residents of New Haven, CT, were willing to give apparently harmful electric shocks-up to 450 volts-to a pitifully protesting victim, simply because a scientific authority commanded them to, and in spite of the fact that the victim did not do anything to deserve such punishment.

I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. - Milgram  The Perils of Obedience (1974)

There is something wrong going on in this world. Something terribly wrong. And it needs to be fixed. I’ve been recommended to look into theories of breaking societal groups into smaller areas which apparently distributes the power in such a way that control barries break down.

If anyone has anything to suggest, please send it in using the contact form at the top of the page.

Video of the Milgram experiment with updated version