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How to control a herd of humans
The New Scientist February 5,
2009
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126945.300-how-to-control-a-herd-of-humans.html
How
to control a herd of humans
Activities performed in unison, like marching
or dancing, increase
loyalty to the group
By David
Robson
HITLER and Mussolini both had the ability to bend millions of
people
to their fascist will. Now evidence from psychology and neurology is
emerging to explain how tactics like organised marching and
propaganda
can work to exert mass mind control.
Scott Wiltermuth of Stanford
University in California and colleagues
have found that activities performed
in unison, such as marching or
dancing, increase loyalty to the group. "It
makes us feel as though
we're part of a larger entity, so we see the group's
welfare as being
as important as our own," he says.
Wiltermuth's team
separated 96 people into four groups who performed
these tasks together:
listening to a song while silently mouthing the
words, singing along,
singing and dancing, or listening to different
versions of the song so that
they sang and danced out of sync. In a
later game, when asked to decide
whether to stick with the group or
strive for personal gain, those in the
non-synchronised group behaved
less loyally than the rest (Psychological
Science, vol 20, p 1).
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the University of
Virginia in
Charlottesville thinks this research helps explain why fascist
leaders, amongst others, use organised marching and chanting to whip
crowds into a frenzy of devotion to their cause, though these tactics
can be used just as well for peace, he stresses. Community dances and
group singing can ease local tension, for example - a theory he plans
to
test experimentally (Journal of Legal Studies, DOI:
10.1086/529447).
Meanwhile, the powerful unifying effects of
propaganda images are
being explored by Charles Seger at Indiana University
at Bloomington.
His team primed students with pictures of their university -
college
sweatshirts or the buildings themselves - then asked how highly they
scored on different emotions, such as pride or happiness. The primed
students gave a strikingly similar emotional profile, in contrast
with
non-primed students (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,
DOI:
10.1016/j.jesp.2008.12.004).
Interest in the idea of a herd mentality has
been renewed by work
into mirror neurons - cells that fire when we perform
an action or
watch someone perform a similar action. It suggests that our
brains
are geared to mimic our peers. "We are set up for 'auto-copy'," says
Haidt.
Neurological evidence seems to back this idea. Vasily
Klucharev, at
the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen, the
Netherlands, found that the brain releases more of the reward
chemical
dopamine when we fall in line with the group consensus
(Neuron, vol 61, p
140). His team asked 24 women to rate more than
200 women for
attractiveness. If a participant discovered their
ratings did not tally with
that of the others, they tended to
readjust their scores. When a woman
realised her differing opinion,
fMRI scans revealed that her brain generated
what the team dubbed an
"error signal". This has a conditioning effect, says
Klucharev: it's
how we learn to follow the crowd.
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