The Crowd Contagion, Consensus, and the Power of the Collective
The Crowd Contagion, Consensus, and the Power of the Collective "An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality." — ERICH FROMM You've probably seen it: a flock of starlings pulsing in the evening sky, swirling this way and that, feinting right, veering left. The flock gets denser, then sparser; it moves faster, then slower; it flies in a beautiful, chaotic concert, as if guided by a secret rhythm. The flock moves way not due to an intentional determination to get from its starting point to a landing place but because of a strange quirk of biology: each bird sees, on average, the seven birds nearest it and adjusts its own behavior in response. If its nearest neighbors move left, it tends left; if they dive right, then it usually dives right as well. The bird does not know the flock's ultimate destination and can make no radical change to the whole. But each of these birds' small alterations, when occurring in rapid sequence, shifts the course of the whole, cr...