The company we keep affects us in more ways than most of us care to believe. We like to think we make up our own minds but experiments have shown that, even with something apparently objective (like whether something is circle-like or square-like) our opinion is highly influenced by what we believe other people think. This is known as social proofing, a tendency to believe that the majority must be right and to follow the crowd.
While we have lots of terms, like mass hysteria, stampede, herd instinct and folie a deux, for negative incidents of social proofing, and lots of examples of the use of social proofing to increase sales, marketing, popularity and status, we do not appear to have terms for groups which inspire their members or lift them to a new level.
Most, if not all, cultures have some form of religion, usually involving coming together for shared rituals. Cynics would say this is either mass hysteria or mass manipulation, but what if they know something we have forgotten, that instead of getting sick through mass hysteria or poor through mass manipulation, we could get well and happy together, more easily than we could apart?
Skepticism is valid and useful, especially since, in our culture, manipulation is rarely entirely absent. At some inspirational events, the energy is cranked up with loud music and high fives while the audience are hypnotised to spend, spend, spend.We can leave credit cards at home and take earplugs to protect hearing, or we can stay at home, but can we avoid all social proofing?
Consensus reality
Unless we live as hermits, we are influenced by consensus reality - what people in general and our culture in particular believe to be true, possible, impossible etc. If the role of the skeptic is to question, we do well to question some of these collectively agreed boundaries, especially those which limit us.
It is one thing to question boundaries and quite another to move beyond them. Positive social proofing can help. When we see other people pushing the envelope of those collectively created boundaries, they expand the envelope for us too. More becomes possible for us and we are never limited in the same way again. Additionally, when a shared energetic field vibrates at a higher level, the energy of all those present is calibrated to that level. As we become lighter, freer and more expansive, it becomes easier to move beyond limiting beliefs.
If we choose our crowds with care, social proofing can be an example of human synergy - being more together than we could be apart, provided, of course, that when we part company with the crowd, we take the benefits with us.
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