The fear of being left behind leads everyone to places they don’t want to be

I just finished reading this post on the BBC website and it really highlighted for me a point I was trying to make with my sister on the weekend.  Esentially my premise was, ‘when making a decision, always do whats best for you, and don’t consider what everyone else is doing’.  We were talking about the then upcoming federal election in Canada, and who we ought to vote for.  I was trying to explain to her that if everyone made their decision based on themselves Democracy would play out the way it was designed and the correct party would be elected into government.  She argued that she should choose the local representative from the party whose platform would benefit the country the most.

Michael Blastland’s article re-enforces for me why my sister’s point of view is the wrong one to take.  Herd mentality is why the same party gets elected even though nobody want’s it.  Here in Canada we have 4-6 parties represented in any given riding.  The number of people I talk to who say to me “I’d like to vote for party X but I don’t want party Y to get elected; So I’m voting for party A to make sure they don’t” is astonishing.  Everyone votes defensively to try and prevent some party from getting elected and chooses a party they don’t agree with because they think everyone else will.  This is the herd mentality at work, and what it ends up doing is electing a government that nobody actually wants, with local representatives most people don’t agree with.

I think the point that Michael leaves out of his article though, is that the herd mentality is psychologically reinforcing.  When people like my sister vote for a winning candidate she might not agree with, there is still a sense of gratification in correctly choosing the person who wins.  A sense of victory for defeating the candidate she wanted to lose.  The shortsightedness of having elected a candidate she didn’t really want in the first place gets lost in the gratification of victory or success.  But that’s only half of the reason a herd mentality prevails.

The other half is that when we’re wrong, we can’t be singled out for the mistake.  We have handy excuses like “Nobody saw it coming!” to dilute the responsibility of making a bad decision.  Being wrong isn’t so bad when everyone else is wrong too.  It’s not fear of wrongness that leads people to move with the herd, it’s the fear of feeling isolated that comes from being the only one making the big mistake.  Others have noted this of course (seen here) but people continue to be powerless against these social pressures.

In this sense being wrong is only an illusion that appears when a comparision is made between one choice and the choice of everyone else.  If the comparison is removed the only evaluation of wrong or right is how the decision impacts the individual, and that’s where my reasoning comes from.  The only mechanism I have to ensure my views are represented is to vote for the candidate that best represents them, regardless of the consideration of eveyrone else.

This is why I voted for a party the herd told me I shouldn’t.  Because if it comes down to being wrong or supporting a the success of a party that doesn’t represent me, I choose to be wrong.

Cheers,

Tarandon

P.S. My candidate didn’t win