Herbert Gold Quotes

The crowd may be influenced easily, largely because it is a crowd.

I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.

When we find ourselves in groups or with charismatic individuals, we might do things we wouldn't ordinarily do.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.

Once the herd starts moving in one direction, it's very hard to turn it, even slightly.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.

When people are free to do as we please, they usually imitate each other.

When in doubt, look at what everyone else is doing.

People say things they'll never do but then do them because they want to be a part of 'this great thing.'

The thing that can happen in a TV room is you can get 'teamthink': you can all go down a crazy path together.

Men are sheep. Where one goes, the rest will soon follow. -Lady Whistledown

I'd rather look ridiculous when everybody else does than plain and sensible all by myself.

Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.

Men go crazy in congregation. They only get better one by one.

As soon as you put men together, they somehow sink, corporatively, below the level of the worst of the individuals composing it. Collect scholars on a club committee, or men of science on a jury; all their virtues vanish, and their vices pop out, reinforced by the self-confidence which the power of numbers is bound to bestow.

It's much better to say, "If the herd is running, I'm running with those guys." And humans have herd mentality.

Herd pressure is to be judged by two things: first, its intensity, and second, its direction.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

The psychology of committees is a special case of the psychology of mobs.

The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.