Why you would jump off a bridge if everyone else was doing it

I’m going to answer that age old question, ‘would you jump off a bridge if everyone else was doing it?’. You know, since I started this site I’ve gotten people emailing me about this (and a bunch of other clichéd questions). Only recently has it occurred to me that at the base of an old platitude, often lies truth. And often that truth can be found in the mind.

Social proof (or social influence) is something you’ve almost certainly heard of before, but rarely is it discussed with any sort of academic rigour. It’s the idea that the more other people appear to prefer something, the more likely we are to prefer it ourselves. When other people are interested in something, we tend to get interested ourselves.

People often use the example of ‘the study conducted in Russia’ to make their point. In the study, a researcher(s) lines up outside a random door on the streets of Moscow. As the researcher(s) wait, random passers-by begin to line up behind the researcher(s). There’s no rhyme or reason to it, but people just line up expecting that, since everyone else is lining up there must be something good at the other end.

It’s a shame this study doesn’t seem to exist.

That isn’t to say social proof isn’t a thing though. Social proof is evident in the effectiveness of online reviews - think of Amazon, Yelp, Goodreads. It’s why ‘trending stories’ on Twitter and Facebook trend - whether we’re interested in them or not, we might be influenced to click on them by virtue of the fact that a bunch of other people seem to dig it. It’s why laugh tracks on sitcoms are a thing (and why you tend to find things funnier when people around you are laughing).

Speaking of the importance of being social, you want to know the single most important factor that drives a friendship? Or maybe you want a ‘friendship checklist’ of what kind of things make a friend worthwhile (or not)? Turning scholarship into wisdom without the usual noise and clutter, we dig up the dirt on psychological theories you can use. Become an armchair psychologist at The Dirt Psychology.