Nalo Hopkinson Quotes

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.

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

What is social proof? Put simply, it's the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something. It's also known as informational social influence.

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

Schoolchildren make up their own rules and enforce their own conformities. They feel safest when leisure time is rationed and dosed. They like to wear uniforms, and they frown on personal idiosyncrasies. Deviance is the mark of an outsider.

Man's desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy (conscience) within his gates; and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always in the interests of its master to crush any half-formed desire to break away from the herd.

Every time I go and shave, I assume there's someone else on the planet shaving. So I say, 'I'm gonna go shave, too.'

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

Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting.

To do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.

Human beings all mimic each other.

A big element of what they regard as conformity is simply a desire to have an audience.

I think it shows that if you have one group of people doing it, you'll get another group of people doing it.

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.

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.

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.

The human race is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it.

When you're in a friend circle, you all kind of talk the same way. And it's hard to do on-the-fly radio edits of yourself.

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.

The character of the crowds is made up of mimicry and hostility.

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

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

People are so constituted that everybody would rather undertake what they see others do, whether they have an aptitude for it or not.

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.