Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

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.

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.

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

Investors, most of them, have a herd mentality. They want to invest only if other people are investing

Men are so constituted that every one undertakes what he sees another successful in, whether he has aptitude for it or not.

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.

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.

I was a bandwagon jumper. If everybody in high school listened to it, so did I.

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

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

... there is a particular propensity in the world for people, wherever they appear in great numbers, to permit themselves collectively everything that would be forbidden them individually.

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.

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.

People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular- and too lazy to think of anything better.

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.

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

It's easy to assume people are conforming when we witness them all choosing the same option, but when we choose that very option ourselves, we have no shortage of perfectly good reasons for why we just happen to be doing the same thing as those other people; they mindlessly conform, but we mindfully choose. This doesn't mean that we're all conformists in denial. It means that we regularly fail to recognize that others' thoughts and behaviors are just as complex and varied as our own. Rather than being alone in a crowd of sheep, we're all individuals in sheep's clothing.

Herd pressure is to be judged by two things: first, its intensity, and second, its direction.

I think people take their behavioural tips from everyone else. So, if the director is calm and the lead actors are calm, no one wants to be the sore thumb. And I've remained friendly with everyone.

Most people are sheep, and they need the support of others.

People invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.

History would indicate that the majority of people have always been sheep.

People huddle together in doctrinaire herds, and the same jackasses who, without the slightest risk, now scream against racism are the same conformist personality types who would have carried torches in lynch mobs a century ago.