An interesting aspect of humanity is the pack mentality. We are of course a social creature and that seems to go deeper than many of us think.

I was watching some coverage of some riots and was thinking about the pack mentality that seems to develop.

One or two individuals often (not always) in a certain setting seem to be reasonable people and yet once in a larger group are willing to partake in violent attacks.

I was watching a programme a few months ago, where they did an interesting experiment.
They had a group of 100 people and put them into the centre of a room. They instructed the group that the two doors of the room were North and South. Next they told everyone, that when a buzzer sounded they were to run as fast as possible out of the North door only, In the first experiment every person ran to the North and escaped.

Then 5 people who were planted pre experiment, had been told to run to the South door despite the instruction to run towards the North door.

When the experiment was repeated it ended that only about 65 had gone to the North Door, but 35ish went to the South door.

The basic idea being, that despite having in your own head an instruction to follow (i.e - North Door), when the pack mentality kicks in people just follow the nearest person to them and lose all sense of which door is which and that without thinking they heard like sheep.

I found this interesting that despite the independence we have, we still flock when in a chaotic situation.

Just an interesting thought. I suppose the same goes with pressure from friends and family. The general situation that kids are talked into smoking or drinking because friends say its cool. Its natural that people conform.

Generally people don't differ much from the main stream image. Just the way we are wired I suppose.