Men, it has been well said,
think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only
recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
Charles
McKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)
It’s a human
trait that whenever we start gathering in groups, we tend to act like idiots or
believe in the absurd. The behaviour of soccer
fans or the success of Bernie Madoff stand as examples.
Delusions usually
start off when one person acts out of the ordinary. OK, way out of the ordinary. For instance, during
the Middle Ages at a convent in France, a nun began to mew like a cat. And she mewed to two nuns, and they mewed to
two nuns and so on and so on and so on… Pretty soon all the nuns were
mewing. And everyday they gathered at
the same time and mewed for several hours together. Now, during the Middle Ages
cats were considered to be BFFs of Satan and when the all the sisters in the
nunnery started sounding like cats, the local citizenry sort of freaked out and
called the cops. These kitty koncerts continued
until the fuzz arrived and told the nuns that soldiers were coming to block the
entrance to the convent and would use their wooden rods to beat the tar out of
any nun who mewed until they promised not to mew anymore. This may be where the expression “cat got
your tongue” originated because the mewing stopped shortly afterward. (Heckler, J.F.C. Epidemics of the
Middle Ages (1844):117 4n)
Then there is the
case of the disappearing dongs. In 1990,
years before Nigerians figured out how to use the Internet to con gullible
Westerners out of their money, the men of the country were losing their
dongs. It all started, apparently, when a
man accidentally bumped into a stranger in public, and moments afterwards the
victim supposedly had a strange feeling in his scrotum and had to grab his junk
to make sure it was intact. He believed
it had disappeared. This caused him to
chase after the stranger and accuse him in public of being a genital thief, which,
of course, would attract a crowd—who in their right mind wouldn’t want to see where
that was going to end?
The growing mob
demanded proof that the pecker had been purloined and forced the victim to drop
his pants. Of course the victim, now
standing half naked in the street, fell back on the Monty Python “She turned
into a newt” defense. He claimed that while there was, indeed, a penis where his
penis was supposed to be (he got better), it was, however, a lot smaller than
before, or it was a “ghost” penis—really, what man wouldn't say that? The
poor accused would then be subsequently beaten until the penis was restored to
it’s original size. There were a few cases
of some being beaten to death—the accused that is.
Whoomp! There It Isn't
The mania spread
quickly and believers became so convinced that genital thieves lurked everywhere
that the streets in Lagos looked like a Michael and Janet Jackson video because men clutched
their crotches, or kept their hands in their pockets to maintain a good hold of
their block and tackle. Women even got
into the act by gripping their mommy bags or crossing their arms over their
chests whenever they were in public. A lack of vigilance and weak willpower, it
was believed, led to the stealing of the weenies. (Ilechukwu, S.T.C. 1992. Magical penis loss in Nigeria:
Report of a recent epidemic of a koro-like syndrome. Transcultural Psychiatric
Research Review 29:91-108.)
There are
hundreds of other examples—single tulip bulbs worth a year’s salary, flying
saucers (a purely 20th Century delusion), and the mid-'70s, early-'80s El Chupacabra, the rat faced, kangaroo-legged, blood-licking, sulphur emitting goatsucker of Puerto Rico. Today’s delusions and episodes of crowd madness
usually involve money. Lots of
money. Think of the biggest chain letter
in history and multiply it by a hundred million.
Whether it is about climate change, running your car on your own urine, or phenomenal returns on investment, when someone says
that he’s an expert and he knows that X is happening right now or will likely
happen in the future, and that other experts like him agree, grip your wallet like a Nigerian. Anyone who has a grounding
in Critical Thinking recognizes two logical fallacies in play here. One is the basing of an argument on the
knowledge of experts (argumentum ad
verecundiam). Just because a group
has a reputation does not mean it is right.
(Thomas Sowell has a great line about experts: “Intellectuals are the last people to realize their own vast
sea of ignorance surrounding the small island of their knowledge. That is why
they are so dangerous.”) And, face it,
experts know shit. When
measured over time, experts are only slightly better than random guessing—chimps
throwing darts at a stock page kind of random. And it doesn’t matter what field they are in—stocks,
technology, marketing—experts are no better at predicting the future than the
guy on the street. Don’t take my word
for it, though, have a read through these: Wrong:
Why the experts keep failing us and how to know when not to trust them, The
Management Myth: Why experts keep
getting it wrong, and Everything
is obvious: *Once you know the answer.
The Opinion of Experts Matter
The other logical
error, that other similar experts agree, is the Consensus or Head Count fallacy
(argumentum ad populum). The flaw is that just because we are told
that a group say X will happen is not evidence that others say in X will happen,
that they even believe in X, or that they even believe X is true. The existence of consensus cannot tell us
whether X is true or false.
The Consensus Says We Should Hang Him. Now.
All this brings
me to the socialmania that’s swept like a prairie fire through the advertising and marketing
industry, through boardrooms and the minds of CMOs (there is no one more
gullible). Social media, the experts tell us, means the death
of traditional advertising, television, marketing, whatever. And because all the experts agree that social
media will change the landscape for good, you need to change your foolish ways,
change if you want survive in the new future of social marketing. How does one change, you ask? Well, paying the experts handsomely to tell
you what you need to know is a start.
Then develop programs that introduce social marketing into your media
mix—plans that can never be measured in any meaningful way.
Well, eventually
nuns stop mewing, wieners suddenly grow back, and chickens start coming home to
roost. It seems that some people have
broken free from the herd and are starting to see things for what they
actually are. One is Todd
Wasserman of Mashable Business who on Tuesday 28 November, wrote: “The social media
marketing backlash has begun. Blame the unlikely team of The Onion
and IBM. The former dropped a pitch-perfect take-down of socmedia “experts” right
before Thanksgiving. Then Big Blue released data that showed Facebook had
almost zero effect on Black Friday sales, and Twitter actually had zero.”
If
you haven’t seen The Onion Video, have a look.
It is brilliant:
I foresee the
Socialmaniacs being held to account and measured against their wild and
unfounded predictions soon (I won’t say when).
I imagine, tho’, they’ll behave like most experts and come up with more
excuses than “Joliet”
Jake Blues.
