composure of the assemblage that waited in the tropics of Guyana for
businesslike death.
From my own perspective, most attempts to analyze the Jonestown
incident have focused too much on the personal qualities of Jim Jones.
Although he was without question a man of rare dynamism, the power
he wielded strikes me as coming less from his remarkable personal style
than from his understanding of fundamental psychological principles.
His real genius as a leader was his realization of the limitations of indi-
vidual leadership. No leader can hope to persuade, regularly and single-
handedly, all the members of the group. A forceful leader can reasonably
expect, however, to persuade some sizable proportion of group mem-
bers. Then the raw information that a substantial number of group
members has been convinced can, by itself, convince the rest. Thus the
most influential leaders are those who know how to arrange group
conditions to allow the principle of social proof to work maximally in
their favor.
It is in this that Jones appears to have been inspired. His masterstroke
was the decision to move the People’s Temple community from its roots
in urban San Francisco to the remoteness of equatorial South America,
where the conditions of uncertainty and exclusive similarity would
make the principle of social proof operate for him as perhaps nowhere
else. There, a settlement of a thousand people, much too large to be
held in persistent sway by the force of one man’s personality, could be
changed from a following into a herd. As slaughterhouse operators have
long known, the mentality of a herd makes it easy to manage. Simply
get some members moving in the desired direction and the others—re-
sponding not so much to the lead animal as to those immediately sur-
rounding them—will peacefully and mechanically go along. The powers
of the amazing Reverend Jim Jones, then, are probably best understood
not in terms of his dramatic personal style, but in his profound know-
ledge of the art of social jujitsu.
HOW TO SAY NO
This chapter began with an account of the relatively harmless practice
of laugh tracking and has moved on to stories of murder and suicide—all
explained by the principle of social proof. How can we expect to defend
ourselves against a weapon of influence that pervades such a vast range
of behavior? The difficulty is compounded by the realization that most
of the time, we don’t want to guard against the information that social
proof provides. The evidence it offers about how we should act is usu-
ally valid and valuable. With it we can cruise confidently through a
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 117