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How to Herd Humans

This also explains why there will always be a thin blue line, and also why you can never trust any group (doctors, lawyers, dentists, real estate agents, cops, secretaries, congresspersons) to self-police: Vasily Klucharev, at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, found that the brain releases more of the reward chemical dopamine when we fall in line with the group consensus. His team asked 24 women to rate more than 200 women for attractiveness.If a participant discovered their ratings did not tally with that of the others, they tended to readjust their scores. When a woman realised her differing opinion, fMRI scans revealed that her brain generated what the team dubbed an "error signal."  This has a conditioning effect, says Klucharev: it's how we learn to follow the crowd...continue to full post

Full post as published by Crime & Federalism on February 04, 2009 (boomark / email).