Susan Cain Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.

If all those around you believe some particular thing, you will soon be tempted to share in that belief.

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

Conformity is inevitable when folks huddle together in rebellion.

The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.

Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with.

Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

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

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

People just don't realize how much peer pressure, the desire for peer acclamation, influences them.

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.

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

I think herd mentality is a good thing overall. Because if every sheep had to figure out the velocity of the wolf and their personal risk, that would take forever.

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.

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

Crowds can be frightening. They have a way of impressing the low, base taste upon their members. Watching the way thousands of people in his audience could not think for themselves, could not find the courage to allow their ordinary feelings of decency and taste to prevail, I understood better how demagogues are possible.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.

Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.

I also think that there's a little peer pressure. They probably think that a majority of people their age think the same things and they want to be considered - I don't know what the word is - in, hip, whatever, with that bunch. I think time will take care of some of this as it is revealed that [Donald] Trump is not what they think.