What is a lemming? Turns out, it’s a hamster with a lousy public-relations representative. Lemmings are cute little guys … OK, rodents, but they’re the cuddly looking kind … who happened to get typecast with one stinking role in a Disney film. Apparently biologists and debunkers have long known that the whole over-the-cliff, mass suicide thing was just a myth.
It was news to me, however, and in case you didn’t know, lemmings migrate en masse and occasionally, in the press of the crowd, a lemming gets knocked aside, sometimes over a cliff. Anyone who’s been in an airport recently, or the buffet line at a casino when they put out the fresh meatballs, can sympathize.
The PR fiasco for the lemmings started when a Disney nature film, back in ‘50s, simulated the event. The filmmakers bought lemmings and herded them into a river, camera rolling. And thus the myth was spread, and “lemming” became synonymous with group stupidity. In one of those juicy ironies, the adoption of the word was an example of the very principle being mocked. As they say, if life gives you lemmings, make lemmingade.
What got me thinking about the influence of groups was getting to spend some time with one of my favorite geniuses, Bob Cialdini, leading social psychologist and author of the classic book “Influence” (www.influenceatwork.com).
He recounted a study about energy conservation. When a sample group of Californians was asked to rate the importance of four possible motivations for efforts to conserve, the responses ended up in this order: (1) it helps save the environment, (2) it benefits society, (3) it saves money and (4) other people are doing it. However, when comparing the respondent’s conservation measures against the belief in each of the four, the last became first—the correlation was twice as strong for “other people” as any of the others.
Influence Of The Crowd
OK, so maybe people recognized the influence of the crowd, but they didn’t want to own up to it. So, in a later study, the researchers took out the attitudinal variable: They delivered a series of appeals to homes, then looked for the impact in actual energy use (via meter readings). Once again, the “other people” appeal bested the others, this time measured by actual behavior.
Another study on conservation was done in hotels, using those familiar little cards in the bathroom with their appeals to conserve resources by reusing towels. Three appeals to noble feelings were tested, along with one that included the statement that a majority of the guests reuse their towels. Score another one for the herd, this time netting 28 percent more participation than the others.
As I listened to Cialdini, I had one of those little personal revelations about motivations. It started when my sister happened to mention to me that a newcomer to town griped that the locals were far less friendly than the folks at home. One of his examples of unfriendliness was that people didn’t wheel their grocery carts to the collection area. When my sister told me this, I recall thinking it nonsensical … what do grocery carts have to do with friendliness? If you ram people with them, well, sure … but abandoning them? It’s not like they’re puppies. In fact, having once had a friend back in college who worked in a grocery store, who enjoyed getting out into the lot to collect carts, I figured that leaving them out was a boon to some bored kid.
Yet, I have since found myself taking grocery carts to the stall, barely conscious of doing so. Only by talking to Cialdini did I become aware that a notion that struck me as false, uttered by a stranger, secondhand, was moving me across the asphalt while my ice cubes were fusing into bricks in the trunk. Would a lemming be so foolish?
Years ago, when I ran a market-research firm, our clients sometimes would ask us why customers did what they did. I learned to hate that question, because while we could tell them what they actually did, and what they said about why they did it, I knew there was an unaccountable sloppiness in measuring the two. That sloppiness includes not just what we don’t admit to, but what we can’t admit to because we don’t believe it. And so we see again the tail wagging the dog that swears it has no tail.
Dale Dauten is the founder of The Innovators’ Lab. His latest book is “(Great) Employees Only: How Gifted Bosses Hire and De-Hire Their Way to Success”.
