of social evidence. We should purchase no products featured in phony
“unrehearsed interview” commercials. Moreover, each manufacturer
of the items should receive a letter explaining our response and recom-
mending that they discontinue use of the advertising agency that pro-
duced so deceptive a presentation of their product.
Of course, we don’t always want to trust the actions of others to direct
our conduct—especially in a situation important enough to warrant
our personal investigation of the pros and cons, or in which we are ex-
perts—but we do want to be able to count on others’ behavior as a
source of valid information in a large array of settings. If, in such set-
tings, we find that we cannot trust the information to be valid because
someone has tampered with the evidence, we ought to be ready to strike
back. In such instances, I personally feel driven by more than the aver-
sion to being duped. I bristle at the thought of being pushed into an
unacceptable corner by those who would undermine one of my hedges
against the decisional overload of modern life. And I get a genuine
sense of righteousness by lashing out when they try. If you are like me,
so should you.
In addition to the times when social evidence is deliberately faked,
there is another time when the principle of social proof will regularly
steer us wrong. In such an instance, an innocent, natural error will
produce snowballing social proof that pushes us to the incorrect de-
cision. The pluralist ignorance phenomenon, in which everyone at an
emergency sees no cause for alarm, is one example of this process. The
best illustration I know, however, comes from a story of one of my
students, who was a highway patrolman.
After a class session in which the subject of discussion was the prin-
ciple of social proof, he stayed to talk with me. He said that he now
understood the cause of a type of traffic accident that had always
puzzled him before. The accident typically occurred on the city freeway
during rush hour, when cars in all lanes were moving steadily but
slowly. Events leading to the accident would start when a pair of cars,
one behind the other, would simultaneously begin signaling an intention
to get out of the lane they were in and into the next. Within seconds, a
long line of drivers to the rear of the first two would follow suit,
thinking that something—a stalled car or a construction barrier—was
blocking the lane ahead. It would be in this crush to cram into the
available spaces of the next lane that a collision frequently happened.
The odd thing about it all, according to the patrolman, was that very
often there had been no obstruction to be avoided in the first place, and
by the time of the accident, this should have been obvious to anyone
who looked. He said he had more than once witnessed such accidents
122 / Influence