The American culture is in love with nonconformity: Cowboys, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) from ‘There will be blood’, Jesse Ventura, Ron Paul, Eliot Spitzer - the list is endless. The Milgram experiment illustrated the distrust towards authority:

“The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

The eroding trust in authorities (Enron, Catholic church, Presidency, etc.) fed the hunger for long wolves. People that do what they need to do because they feel like it. Moral superiority belongs to the loners that create their own rules.

Not so, says David Berreby, author of “Us and Them: Understanding your Tribal Mind”.

In a NY Times piece, he explains that the psychologists Hodges and Geyser took a second look at the Milgram and Asch experiments and came to new conclusions:

“This means that the subjects in the most famous “people are sheep” experiments were not sheep at all - they were human beings who largely stuck to their guns, but now and then went along with the group. Why? Because in getting along with other people, most decent people know, as Hodges and Geyser put it, the “importance of cooperations, tact and social solidarity in situations that are tense or difficult.”

(…) Milgram’s “subjects were not simply obeying a leader, but responding to someone whose credentials and good faith they thought they could trust.” Without that kind of trust society would fall apart tomorrow, because most of what we know about the world comes to us from other people.”

David’s writing reminded me of Mark Earls’ “Herd” book, blog and overall thesis that it is our innate nature as “herd” animals that causes mass movements, not the influence of a handful of individuals.

The traditional church of marketing was built around the belief that humans are lone wolves that want to stand out from the crowd. The problem is that people have a tribal desire to follow the herd and be part of a group. Sure, there are instances when they want to stand out and be considered as lone wolves. But, the rest of the time, the same people want to be part of a group and just fit in.

To leverage the full power of Conversational Marketing, businesses have to change how they think about human/tribal behavior. The advent of Social Networks and Web 2.0 has shown us that humans want to stand out by fitting in. Social Media campaigns have to feed this primal human desire and help people to belong.

Most marketing theory is based on the idea that people are logical creatures. At one point in the purchase decision process, people will take careful account of all available information before making the final decision. There is growing evidence that this is not the case. (to get more in-depth look at Herd behavior and how you should adjust our marketing, read Mark Earls’ ‘How to Change Mass Behavior by Harnessing our True Nature’. A must for marketers.)

One of the most quoted theories is called ‘Information Cascades’ that can lead people to serious miscalculations and errors. Here’s how Robert J. Shiller from the NY Times explains the theory:

“Suppose that a group of individuals must make an important decision, based on useful but incomplete information. Each one of them has received some information relevant to the decision, but the information is incomplete and “noisy” and does not always point to the right conclusion.

Let’s update the example to apply it to the recent bubble: The individuals in the group must each decide whether real estate is a terrific investment and whether to buy some property. Suppose that there is a 60 percent probability that any one person’s information will lead to the right decision.

In other words, that person’s information is useful but not definitive — and not clear enough to make a firm judgment about something as momentous as a market bubble. Perhaps that is how Mr. Greenspan assessed the probability that he could make an accurate judgment about the stock market bubble.

The theory helps explain why he — or anyone trying to verify the existence of a market bubble — may have squelched his own judgment.

The fundamental problem is that the information obtained by any individual — even one as well-placed as the chairman of the Federal Reserve — is bound to be incomplete. If people could somehow hold a national town meeting and share their independent information, they would have the opportunity to see the full weight of the evidence. Any individual errors would be averaged out, and the participants would collectively reach the correct decision.”

Let’s look a typical purchase decision: You are in the market for a laptop. You’ve always had a PC but you are delighted by your iPhone and iPod experience. You have trepidations switching from PC to Mac - the learning curve worries you. But you hear Vista is not the best operating system ever. What to do? You scan the CNET’s, PC World’s of the world. The information gets more confusing. So you start to ask around: The Mac cultists, the PC nerds, friends using Vista on a new laptop, friends that switched from PC to Mac. And you scan message boards, social networks and other independent point of views. That’s how you form your opinion: through personal opinions, half-truths and emotionally charged point of views.

In general, herd behavior happens for two reasons: Social pressure of conformity and the perception that large groups can’t be wrong. Businesses need to focus on the latter. Interjecting reason and facts into a conversation can change the discussion considerably. Individuals might have that nagging feeling that the large group is wrong but they still follow the herd: Humans often fall into the trap that large groups know something they don’t. And that’s the opportunity most businesses miss out on:

Does Vista really suck? Is it really slow? The majority says so. I haven’t tried it yet. All I know is from people that told me that they would rather have XP back. Instead of hiring new agencies to sell the public on Vista, Microsoft should invest their money on social media outreach and Conversational Marketing efforts to listen, learn, respond and change.

Companies who learn how to have a conversations and empower their fans to spread the word will be able to fight the ‘Information Cascades Effect’. When people engage other people in conversations about products, they know that they’re dealing with subjective opinions. They will be open and ready to listen and respond to companies who engage them with facts, not marketing blubber. Consider Conversational Marketing as a daily town meeting about your product and business.