Blog03: Conformity and Prankshows

Social circumstances may define you or what you do?

Perhaps. Just the other day, Moses and I were talking about how most hidden camera prank shows (like that of Gotcha, Just for Variety, etc.) tend to use basic social psychology principles.

A key example: Jasmine's blog recently talked about this Japanese game show, where this group of people (about 40-60) run towards this target person. Relying on the group's contagion, the target assumes that they are running away from something (or towards him!) and acts accordingly to the group's influence. This form of conformity is when informational social influence backfires. The factors that predict conformity because (1) the situation is ambigious and (2) it is ambiguous. As such, we would tend to quickly assume that the group has more accurate information than us.

Later on in that video, the group (now only about 30-40 people) targets a lone individual and walks around the unsuspecting person and completely surrounds him. At this point, the group is around the person but still everyone still causally walks forward. Then, all of a sudden, they all ducked. The naive target instantly ducks with the group.

Same thing. :D But before someone yells 'Plagarism!'...

I remember that I used to refer to this kind of behaviour by a specific term: collective stupidity. The etymology of the word basically attributes this kind of conformity to people being stupid - as in stupid enough to let this happen to them, as the notion for most people, attributing this to personal characteristics instead of the power of the situation.

Obviously, this definition is a little off; quite incorrect. The phrase, as I know, occurs from this famous quote by famous cyberculturist and collective intelligence researcher Pierre Levy:

"Collective intelligence has no relationship to the stupidity of crowd behavior."

Yes - Collective intelligence - the point of this longish post; intelligence that is derived from the collaboration and competition of many behaviours. The concept is not new, but from my readings, seems like a under developed one, even though it is amusingly brilliant.

Collective intelligence, as quoted by Levy, *is* different from what we may consider the conformity. It basically talks about the systems by which information is used by a series of sentient beings (strange word, yes?) to come to a consensus in decision making. Collective Intelligence accounts for this consensus decision making within systems of human, bacteria, animals, computers and quarks (quantum particles, relativism at your own risk).

The argument is that this process is largely more efficient and remain at the basic operating level of sentience and can overcome groupthink and cognitive bias.

I only bring this up because I tend to think that logic-driven organisms, such as humans, tend to do *funny* things sometimes. That got me thinking. Obviously, some of this behaviours can be explained, but the rationalization or efficiency may be somewhat comprised. Who knows. Anyway, that was just something to think about.

But, no - where did Vivian come up with this?

One day, I was getting on the train to get to school. At the train platform I saw this:

No big deal, yeah?

Here's the clincher, The train approaches from the other direction. All those people in the station - they're faced the wrong way.

Why are they faced in the wrong direction? Simple: cause the sun's in their faces. I thought that it was funny.

Thanks for reading. :D