When one wakes up with images of people in costumes taking over the United States Capitol He wonders how a certain group of people could have come to the conclusion that this would be good, aesthetic, interesting, or any other flattering epithet.
The thing is that we don't understand them (nor do they understand us) because we live in increasingly impermeable bubbles (perhaps fueled by social media algorithms and partisanship and political demagogy). Underneath all this problem lies our greatest gift, and also our problem: that we are expert copyers of what surrounds us.
Memes and bubbles
Imitation is embedded in the neurological circuits of our brain. If our behavior differs from the behavior of the people around us, then the neurons emit an alarm signal: regions associated with reinforcement learning and those that modulate reward are activated. According to the neurologist Vasily Klucharev, we act this way because we perceive that, by going in a group, we will obtain more benefits. Herding, then, thrives thanks to its inherent evolutionary advantages.
All of us are born with this programming in our brains: imitate others to increase your chances of survival. Therefore, as soon as we are born, we already tend to imitate those around us, as has been observed in babies of a few months.
Although it may seem like an insignificant action (and in some areas it is even considered indecorous or illegal), copying others is the system by which human beings have progressed culturally throughout history. And furthermore, as I will explain a little later, copying is not as easy as it seems: in fact it is so difficult that only human beings are capable of doing it with the appropriate precision.
When we are born we are presented in a generally hostile environment full of imponderables that we do not know in advance. For example, we don't know that maybe there is a certain predator that could hunt us if we leave the town. Or that it is not a good idea to touch a plug with wet hands. Or that you have to run if there is a fire. The only way we can learn all these rules of survival is through instruction.
However, The time needed to receive all this information is not exactly short.. There are so many tips and details that we must learn that, while we do so, we may fall victim to electricity or the teeth of a predator. So, we have to find a shortcut until we have figured out the details. That shortcut is imitation.
This was reflected in an experiment carried out by Jens Krause and John Dyer at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom: the 5 % of the members of a crowd are enough to influence the direction the crowd will take.
Another famous experiment in this regard was carried out in 1968 by the psychologist Stanley Milgram on a sidewalk in New York. Milgram dedicated himself to observing the behavior of 1,424 pedestrians as they walked along a fifty-foot-long stretch of sidewalk. Previously, Milgram had placed his collaborators on the sidewalk who, following his instructions, would suddenly stop and look toward a window on the sixth floor of a nearby building for exactly one minute.
The important thing about this experiment is that, in the window where Milgram's collaborators were looking, there was nothing exceptional, there was just another of Milgram's assistants. What happened to the pedestrians on that road?
After reviewing the video recordings that Milgram had made, it was observed that some pedestrians also stopped and looked where the hooks or stimulus groups were facing. But the people who stopped also depended on the people who had already stopped: Milgran recorded what happened when one of his collaborators stopped to look at the window, and also what happened when more than one collaborator stopped. The effects were different. As explained Nicholas Christakis in his book Connected:
If 4 percent of pedestrians stopped when that "group" was made up of one person, up to 40 percent did so when the group was made up of fifteen. (…) More interesting than this difference, however, is that the stimulus group composed of five people influenced the behavior of the pedestrians almost as much as the group of fifteen. That is, in this scenario, groups composed of more than five people caused almost no new effects on pedestrian behavior.
Although we also imitate others to forge more powerful bonds with them. By dressing like them, by acquiring their customs or their ways of speaking, in some way we are telling them that we are like them, and that they should let us enter the group. Because in a group we also increase the chances of survival. In the end, if we imitate our peers, echo chambers are created, increasingly isolated, increasingly different from the other echo chambers. Bubbles increasingly separated from each other.
This gap of incomprehension can cause others to end up seeming strange, stupid, caricatures of people. Some dress up, others engage in demagoguery, others have bad faith... it doesn't matter what we see: we are going to see it more and more. Positions will become increasingly radicalized, whether by surrounding Congress, storming the Capitol and setting the streets on fire, whether they are related to the process, Black Lives Matters or the rednecks who take Trump's word as the Bible.
And if there is any doubt or fissure in the argument, any minimal cognitive dissonance, then hatred of others, ethnicity, racism, xenophobia, classism and, in short, group identity, will do the rest. Because we all, increasingly, live in bubbles:
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The news
We copy others much more than we think and that is why it is dangerous to live in bubbles
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.