short of an axe murder until some public embarrassment of the board finally

causes their intervention. A typical board-of-directors’ culture was once well

described by my friend, Joe Rosenfield, as he said, “They asked me if I wanted

to become a director of Northwest Bell, and it was the last thing they ever

asked me.”

 

In advertising and sales promotion, Social-Proof Tendency is about as strong a

factor as one could imagine. “Monkey-see, monkey-do” is the old phrase that

reminds one of how strongly John will often wish to do something, or have

something, just because Joe does or has it. One interesting consequence is that

an advertiser will pay a lot to have its soup can, instead of someone else’s, in

a movie scene involving soup consumption only in a peripheral way.

 

Social-Proof Tendency often interacts in a perverse way with Envy/Jealousy and

Deprival-Superreaction Tendency. One such interaction amused my family for years

as people recalled the time when my cousin Russ and I, at ages three and four,

fought and howled over a single surplus shingle while surrounded by a virtual

sea of surplus shingles.

 

But the adult versions of this occasion, boosted by psychological tendencies

preserving ideologies, are not funny and can bring down whole civilizations. The

Middle East now presents just such a threat. By now the resources spent by Jews,

Arabs and all others over a small amount of disputed land if divided arbitrarily

among land claimants, would have made every one better off, even before taking

into account any benefit from reduced threat of war, possibly nuclear.