Niccolo Machiavelli Quotes

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.

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.

We are to a large extent an imitative society.

The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.

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.

Most people suspend their judgment till somebody else has expressed his own and then they repeat it.

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.'

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.

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

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

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

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Popular opinion is the biggest 'filter' for most people - they don't have to try something if they've already been told it's not cool.

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.

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one - the one we use - which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. Look at it in politics.

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

What one person does, several people usually consider.

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

Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, Corn-Pone stands for Self-Approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is Conformity.

The majority have no other reason for their opinions than that they are the fashion.

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

We are creatures of imitation. We find it hard to resist the temptation to do that which we see others doing.

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.