Imagine two restaurants of comparable quality. Along comes the evening’s first customer, who has to choose between these two restaurants. He flips a coin and picks restaurant A. Now imagine the next customer. Confronted with the same choice, she has the same information plus she sees the first customer sitting in the window of restaurant A. What does she do?
Psy-Op: Phantom Nose
Cross your fingers. Now stroke the tip of your nose in the notch of your crossed fingers, such that the tips of both crossed fingers touch it. Do you feel the disembodied second nose? If you do, it’s because the opposite sides of our first and second fingers are used to feeling things separated by space. By crossing your fingers, you use one object (your nose) to impersonate the sensation usually created by two objects.
You can see where this is going.
But at this point, restaurant B still has hope—how much does the second customer trust the first customer’s choice? Well, is he attractive? Does he smoke? How’s he dressed? What’s his posture? The more the second person identifies with the first, the more she trusts his choice.
Once the second customer chooses restaurant A too, it starts to solidify a consensus. The third customer would have to buck a significant trend, voting against two people, in order to choose restaurant B.
Soon, you can imagine a line out the door of restaurant A, while restaurant B sits empty—despite the restaurants’ similar quality.
While this example is admittedly simplified—at a certain point people choose restaurant B specifically because too many others are in A—the pull of the sheeple effect is nonetheless strong and can at times result in baaaad choices (and worse jokes …).