Of course, it is difficult to identify and correctly weigh all the possible ways

to deploy the cash flow of an oil company. So oil company executives, like

everyone else, have made many bad decisions that were quickly triggered by

discomfort from doubt. Going along with social proof provided by the action of

other oil companies ends this discomfort in a natural way.

 

When will Social-Proof Tendency be most easily triggered? Here the answer is

clear from many experiments: Triggering most readily occurs in the presence of

puzzlement or stress, and particularly when both exist.

 

Because stress intensifies Social-Proof Tendency, disreputable sales

organizations, engaged, for instance, in such action as selling swampland to

schoolteachers, manipulate targets into situations combining isolation and

stress. The isolation strengthens the social proof provided by both the knaves

and the people who buy first, and the stress, often increased by fatigue,

augments the targets’ susceptibility to the social proof. And, of course, the

techniques of our worst “religious” cults imitate those of the knavish salesmen.

One cult even used rattlesnakes to heighten the stress felt by conversion

targets.

 

Because both bad and good behavior are made contagious by Social-Proof Tendency,

it is highly important that human societies (1) stop any bad behavior before it

spreads and (2) foster and display all good behavior.

 

My father once told me that just after commencing law practice in Omaha, he went