Social Proof

I bought the book over two years ago, but I’m just know getting around to reading it. The following is an excerpt from The Wisdom Of Crowds by James Suroweicki.  I thought it was pretty interesting.

In 1968, the social psychologists Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz decided to cause a little trouble.

First, they put a single person on a street corner and had him look up at an empty sky for sixty seconds.  A tiny fraction of the passing pedestrians stopped to see what the guy was looking at…

…but most just walked by.

Next time around, the psychologists put five skyward-looking men on the corner.  This time four times as many people stopped to gaze at the empty sky.

When the psychologists put fifteen men on the corner, 45 percent of all passers stopped, and increasing the cohort of observers made more than 80 percent of pedestrians tilt their heads and look up.

This study appears, at first glance, to be another demonstration of people’s willingness to conform.  But in fact it illustrated something different, namely the idea of social proof…

…which is the tendency to assume that if lots of people are doing something or believe something, there must be a good reason why.

If you’re having trouble finding people who believe in what you’re trying to do in your church, it may be because you’re doing it by yourself. You may want to find some others to look up with you.

Social proof is extremely underrated.