- Khaiyam Khalid
- Dec 16, 2022
- 5 min read
Updated: Dec 23, 2022
By Khaiyam and: https://www.instagram.com/khalidkhaiyam/
4- Bandwagon effect bias
Pic says: “Ideas, fads, and beliefs grow as more people adopt them. Sally believes fidget spinners help her children, Francis does too.”
Order:
1: What is it?
Our actions are influenced by a majority on an emotional basis.
2: Elaboration
Action: in a broad sense all of the thoughts, imaginations, the way you think and imagine, your expression, behaviour, action and the way you behave express and act, literally everything.
Influenced: you accept and adopt actions causing without any direct apparent effort, which are not based on your critical thinking, consciousness and reasoning.
Better words than mine: “Herd mentality, mob mentality or pack mentality describes how people can be influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviours on a largely emotional, rather than rational, basis. When individuals are affected by mob mentality, they may make different decisions than they would have individually.”
Emotional: you adopt other’s acts in 2 ways:
1: rational.
2: emotional.
In this case, you accept your peers acts on a largely emotional rather than rational basis.
You go the way everyone goes, just by accepting them and you don’t reflect on the matter and research it.
3: Example
When everyone starts wearing any designed outfit, you will also start to...
4: Explanation
We need to understand the emotional and rational brain.
Our actions, expressions, behaviours... Everything is based on thoughts.
They are another form of information which comes from the outside world (non of your mind). So basically “Thoughts are words in our minds, as imagination is a picture in it”.
The thoughts are seeds of our every single movement.
One of those actions is considered in emotions...Let’s understand.
Our brain has some parts. Here we will discuss about 3:
1: Thalamus.
2: Visual cortex.
3: Amygdala.
Thalamus: Where info forms in thoughts and imagination and where it is translated into the language of the mind.
Visual cortex: Then most of the messages go to the visual (cerebral) cortex. To analyse the info.
Amygdala: in the process of analysis, if the info is emotional it will be sent to the Amygdala.
Then the emotional potentials play role in this process. In emotional conditions info comes to the thalamus and then to the visual cortex and so on.
But everything happens emotionally. And when your emotional brain is much more active than the rational brain, all of your acts happen emotionally.
In the case of increasing emotions, thoughts change their ways to go to the Amygdala by the cerebral cortex and take a shortcut which plays a great role to empower your emotional brain.
(Understanding the thought is quite important, that’s why I explained it in my other article “the language of mind” which I’m about to explain)
I suggest you read the book Emotional intelligence by Daniel Goleman.
Here is what the author said in better words:
“A visual signal first goes from the retina to the thalamus, where it is translated into the language of brain. Most of the message then goes to the visual cortex, where it is analyzed and assessed for meaning and appreciate response; if that response is emotional, a signal goes to the amygdala to activate the emotional centres. But a smaller portion of the original signal goes straight from the thalamus to the amygdala in a quicker transmission, allowing a faster (though less precise) response. Thus the amygdala can trigger an emotional response before the cortical centres have fully understood what is happening”
Here we understand two points:
1: Emotional & rational brain.
2: Anatomy of emotional hijacking.
Rational brain: “Your rational brain represents your ability to reason through centres options whilst your emotional brain represents your instincts, impulses, and intuition. While your thinking brain is making provision for your retirement, your feeling brain wants to plan for a vacation”
2: Anatomy of emotional hijacking:
“In his book Working With Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman coined the term “emotional hijacking” to describe situations in which the amygdala — the brain's emotional processing centre — takes over the normal reasoning process. This can occur during difficult interactions with others.”
“During an emotional hijack, our thinking brain gets paralyzed, which means our IQ drops, we lose the ability to make complex decisions, we no longer see other perspectives and our memory becomes compromised — Not the most helpful scenario in social settings.”
Let’s understand much further:
Understand it by different examples:
1: People love to spend money on branded costly stuff. So you also desire to get that while you might don’t even need that at all.
In the depths of this example, we also see that when a branded stuff owner you see, you feel something weird and their impression of yourself covers your essentials...
(I suggest you read the book “the psychology of money”)
2: Alarm alerts people in the building “Fire! Fire! Fire!” everyone runs in panic, when you come out, you start running the same way they are running without any consideration.
3: Pranks are on trend nowadays. One of those pranks is the prank elevator.
When a person in an elevator sees some strangers sit without any reason, that person also sits, when they turn their face in an opposite direction that person also...
You may think that it happens by rational decisions. Nope, not at all. He thinks emotionally but it seems rational.
4: Including you, the school cheer up for a team blue, but after sometimes a new team, the team black is on the trends. People started cheering for team black instead of team blue, while they had a strong connection with that before the black appears, but they turned. After a while you step aside and started supporting the team black.
There are a lot of examples which say by their selves the reasons of this bandwagon effect in different conditions.
1: in first example of money, the desire of wealth and praise trapped you in.
2: in the second, panic reasoned to...
3: in the pranks, base was the fear of being wrong.
4: the case of joining others tells that the reason behind this was fear of exclusion and getting exerted by the group which changed your subsequent act in the allegiance of the majority.
This bias extends to all sorts of psychological phenomena and these were the base and this is how this bias occurs.
5: Effects
In:
Social
Belief
Politics
The very first effect which is deforming the society is “politically distracted beliefs in social...” which reasoned in rights, fights, clashes and inhumanity.
You see news against your religion like someone being beaten or killed by another religious person. And the media takes over to make it much more irrational and irritating: “Breaking news! This religion is trying to come over that religion. A person is brutally killed, and this might can be a threat to another religion...”
Is that what news is called? Journalism is all about sharing information.
By seeing this news you don’t think that a majority of that religion is again it, whether they show it up or not as not everyone comes across the street. So the hate must should be limited and confined to that cruel killer.
Only intellectuals think this way, as we can observe in our everyday life.
But after seeing these messages you observe that you go the way everyone is going meanwhile you know the reality of media you know the darkness of politics and you better know the people.
6: How to?
Just have mindfulness before you act, think rationally, and become an intellectual.
Start with why? Why I go the way everyone is going, don’t have I mind to think. I’m not a fool. I also have mind to find out the reasons and step ways in my life. Why is this happening? What is the actuality behind it? Why I’m supposed to vote for this person? Is he developing our beloved country or is he just giving us words that he will give us this and that, and he always talks about religion... Think of why and what.
And slow down your judging process. Try to conclude in not a short time.
