| By :
George Hutton
We humans like to think that we are logical, highly evolved, intelligent creatures that put a little bit of thought into our actions. That we don't act rashly when it's time to make an important, perhaps life changing decision. The truth is however, that we are still much more highly responsive to basic instincts and external sources of influence than we'd like to admit. What is widely regarded is the strongest outside motivating factor is that of "Social Proof." Social proof is responsible for market crashes, fashion trends, horrible behavior by entire countries, and even pet rocks. The positive news is you can easily leverage this for your own benefit, as well as protect yourself from giving in to it. What are the reasons social proof is so strong? Imagine living fifty or a hundred thousand years ago. Your survival was a daily battle between you and the elements. There wasn't much of a guarantee of anything. The only hope we had was to stick together in our tribe. When our tribe decided to move, we moved right along with it. If you were the kind of person that always argued with what everybody else was doing, you wouldn't have survived very long. And you wouldn't have, therefore, passed on many of those genes that made it possible to ignore what everybody else was doing. Since evolution is an extremely slow process, our minds are still programmed with that "follow the crowd" mentality when it comes to many things. If you've ever been walking down the street and saw a large crowd gathered, it was likely very hard to keep from feeling the desire to investigate and find out what they were gawking at. If you strolled by a fellow on a street corner staring at the sky, you may wonder what was wrong with him. But if you passed by a group on the street corner staring up, you'd likely wonder what as up in the sky. How can you leverage this? Simple. Use any way that you can to present your idea of suggested course of action as already having the masses on your side. As if the masses have already decided that your idea, whatever it is, is already a foregone conclusion. There's a reason McDonalds has those signs that say "Over twenty seven trillion sold," or whatever the exact figures are. How can you avoid being sucked into an expensive or dangerous idea by a crowd? Ask yourself how strongly you'd want to do this if nobody else was doing it. Would you be standing there doing the Macarena if nobody else was? Probably not. This can take some fortitude, as it can be incredibly hard to resist the will of a crowd, as numerous social experiments have proven. It may take some time to build up some resistance, but it's worth it in the long run.
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