The Principle of Social Proof

An innocent, natural error will produce snowballing social proof that pushes us to the incorrect decision. The pluralist ignorance phenomenon in which everyone at an emergency sees no cause for alarm is one example of this process. We seem to assume that if a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don't. Especially when we are uncertain, we are willing to place an enormous amount of trust in the collective knowledge of the crowd. Secod quite frequently, the crowd is mistaken, because they are not acting on the basis of any superior information, but are reacting themselves to the principle of social proof.