walk around a large hall without talking to each other. A select few were then given more detailed instructions on where to walk. The scientists discovered that people end up blindly following one or two instructed people who appear to know where they are going. The results of this experiment showed that it only takes 5% of confident looking and instructed people to influence the direction of the other 95% of people in the crowd, and the 200 volunteers did this without even realizing it. Researchers from Hebrew University, NYU, and MIT explored herd mentality in online spaces, specifically in the context of "digitized, aggregated opinions." Online comments were given an initial positive or negative vote (up or down) on an undisclosed website over five months. The control group comments were left alone. The researchers found that "the first person reading the comment was 32% more likely to upvote it if it had been already given a fake positive score." Over the five months, comments artificially rated positively showed a 25% higher average score than the control group, with the initial negative vote ending up with no statistical significance in comparison to the control group. The researchers found that "prior ratings created significant bias in individual rating behavior, and positive and negative social influences created asymmetric herding effects." "That is a significant change," Dr. Aral, one of the researchers involved in the experiment, stated. "We saw how these very small signals of social influence snowballed into behaviors like herding." See also Anonymity Anxiety Argumentum ad populum Bandwagon effect Cancel culture Collective intelligence Conformity Critical mass (sociodynamics) Crowd abuse Crowd psychology Decentralized decision making Delphi method Doomscrolling Early adopter Folie à deux Freethought Fear Groupthink Herd behavior Information cascade List of most-disliked YouTube videos Manipulation (psychology) Mass psychogenic illness (mass hysteria) Monkey see, monkey do Opinion leadership Peer pressure Predictive market Riot Sheeple Social network Slave morality The Emperor's New Clothes The Wisdom of Crowds Trial by media Philosophers Søren Kierkegaard Friedrich Nietzsche José Ortega y Gasset Everett Dean Martin References Further reading Bloom, Howard, The Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. (2000) John Wiley & Sons, New York. Freud, Sigmund's Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921; English translation Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, *1922). Reprinted 1959 Liveright, New York. Gladwell, Malcolm, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a