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Herd behavior, seen in both animals and humans, can have negative or positive consequences. It can lead to panic, stampedes, and violence, but also protect the survival of a group. Examples include stock market crashes and Black Friday sales. The herd is motivated by self-interest, and individuals often look to others for clues on how to behave.
Anyone who has watched a nature show about herding animals may have seen what a stampede looks like, that sudden, chaotic movement when a herd of animals panics and starts rushing in every direction. Rushes are not planned events but tend to affect the entire herd and can lead to quite disastrous results such as injured or trapped animals. A stampede can also have positive results, as most animals flee from a predator, which therefore protects the survival of the herd.
These unplanned incidents are called herd behavior and the term has been applied to many aspects of human culture. While people may think of themselves as individuals, groups of people can act in concert, especially in situations that leave little time to make decisions. Like herd stampedes, this behavior in humans can have negative or positive consequences.
The term “herd behavior” as it applies to humans first appears in Dr. Wilfred Trotter’s 1914 book Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. It wasn’t exactly a new idea, although Trotter can be credited with the phrase. Sigmund Freud, for example, extensively discusses his ideas on crowd psychology, and Carl Jung suggests that crowd psychology is the result of the universal or collective unconscious.
Examples of this behavior can be seen in economics. For example, if some people start selling a certain type of stock, it can lead to mass selling and panic, and leave the market open to crash. Similarly, someone might observe behavior in the retail environment the day after the Thanksgiving sales. People have been injured trying to get a special item offered at a very good price, when the doors of a shop open and crowds rush in. Such escapes have also occurred at open-seated rock concerts, where all the people try to run to get the seats closest to the front. These have occasionally had tragic results.
One aspect of herd behavior that is often noted is that the herd is not entirely concerned with the protection of the group. Instead, self-interest is a primary motivation. Herd animals, when fearful of a predator, work to get into the center of the herd so they are less vulnerable, just as people have only self-interest in mind when they knock over others to reach a cheap item or seats. before a rock concert, or even more when they start selling or buying shares to make a profit or make an investment that will prove profitable in the near future.
Things like house prices can be influenced by crowd psychology, especially when boosted by the media. In 2007, the Press Democrat of Santa Rosa, California published an angry letter to the editor asking them not to write anything else about housing market declines. The writer worried that the ongoing reports were driving down the price of his own home; in other words, he feared the herd instincts of others who would panic and try to sell before home prices dropped further, which would only lead to falling home prices and a flooded market.
Herd behavior can be called by other names such as “crowd mentality”. A sudden crisis or demonstration that gets out of control can be prone to “driving” humans into violent confrontations with others. More simply, a large group of people gathering in a single area can produce panic and stampedes, riots, violence and a huge number of deaths.
There is also an innocent factor in this behavior, since people often look to others for clues about how to behave. Given the choice between two similar stores that are nearly empty, people almost always choose the store that has other people, representing a desire to move with the “herd.”
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