The Power of Others by Michael Bond
BOOK REVIEWS BY BINOD
BINOD’S RATING: 8/10Teenage cliques, jihadist cells, army units, Arab Spring protesters, polar expeditions, and football hooligans.
On the face of it, each of these groups might seem exceptional, but the forces that bind and drive them can affect us all. In recent decades, psychologists have uncovered how and why our innate socialness holds huge sway over how we think and act, propelling us to both high achievement and unthinking cruelty.
We are beholden to our peers, even when we think we’re calling the shots. This is the power of others.
“If you think you’re drinking, smoking or eating too much, then it’s a good idea to have a look at the friends that you’re hanging out with. Because those sorts of behaviours are very quickly replicated within friendship groups.”
Key points
Bond begins by explaining why it is natural for humans to want to be part of a group. He goes on to define social mimicry and looks at how this mirroring of body language, and even moods, “helps us understand other people’s minds.”
We mimic without thinking, and at high speed. Our mimicry is primitive. All primates do it, including human infants, who start to copy their mother’s facial gestures when they are just a few hours old. This leads to a remarkable interaction during social encounters. Watch a slowed-down film of two people in conversation, and the coordination between them looks almost balletic. And the greater the rapport they share, the more synchronized their movements tend to be.
Bond cites research exploding the theory of the madness of the mob. “The malice of crowds is a popular myth, but what really happens is people actually become extremely co-operative. And it’s remarkable when you look at what happens during crowd disasters like Hillsborough. There were lots of reports about people trampling on each other but, actually, the interviews done with people in that crowd showed that they were remarkably altruistic and kind towards each other. If it hadn’t been for that, a lot more people would likely have been killed”.
Mass hysteria is thought to be an extreme example of a phenomenon that affects us all day-to-day: emotional contagion. It is hard to escape it; we are vulnerable to the moods and behaviors of others to an extraordinary degree. Emotional contagion caused the failure of successive banks at the start of the Great Depression in the 1930s. It is the force behind fuel crises, health scares and the spread of public grief (for example in Britain after the death of Princess Diana in August 1997). It is the reason why you are more likely to be obese if you have obese friends, and depressed if you are living with a depressed roommate.
But emotional contagion is not all bad. The mechanism behind it – our tendency to mimic each other’s expressions and behaviors – is crucial to social interaction. Without it, anything beyond superficial communication would be impossible.
Happy people tend to be clustered together, and that furthermore their chances of being happy increase the better connected they are to other happy people. This shows that what really matters for your own happiness is how happy your friends are.
Bond chronicles how authority, peer pressure and the environment can combine in dreadful ways, producing truly evil behavior such as that of Adolf Eichmann during World War II.
The shocking results obtained by Stanley Milgram during his infamous experiments conducted at Yale University during the 1960s illustrates how important context is to how people behave. A lot of terrible things are done by people not because they’re inherently evil but because they are shaped by the situations they’re in. Bond talks about the ‘banality of evil’- most war criminals and suicide bombers are, contrary to popular belief, spectacularly ordinary. They don’t stand out from their population. If anything, they’re more easily led and more easily influenced.
The physical sensation of an emotion – racing pulse, contracting muscles or dilated pupils – precedes its representation in the brain. Proof? Women who had received Botox injections in their frown muscles showed decreased activity in their amygdala, a brain region critical to emotions, when asked to make an angry face. This was because the Botox made it harder for them to express anger in their face, and thus interfered with their ability to feel it. This is not good news for social interaction: If your face and cognitive reactions are lagging behind the conversation, the person you are talking to will get the impression you are disinterested. They may even perceive you negatively.
Courageous acts are more about circumstance than character.
“What is the impact of the internet now that our virtual friendship groups are in the hundreds?”
There is a positive correlation between racism/xenophobia and fear/uncertainty.
Suffering in isolation is more survivable when the victim can ascribe greater meaning to it.
Bond emphasizes protecting yourself when making decisions in today’s wired environment, with its vivid imagery and continuous “information cascade.” Bond also discusses how group dynamics and perceptions affect those individuals who are perceived as the “Other,” especially during times of stress or threat to the in-group, such as the months and years following 9/11.
The idea that you are constantly influenced by those around you may be a scary one. But Bond argues that we should be wary of trying to disrupt the process – because ‘although the presence of others can lead us astray, their absence can propel us to a far worse place’. He said: ‘But I think you’d have to have a very good reason to cut yourself off from it, because it’s mostly good. When you get to the other extreme – the effects of social isolation can be really serious. A lot of bad things are done by people not because they’re inherently evil but because they are shaped by the situations they’re in’.
Bond also talks about how to understand human behaviors during and after prolonged solitary confinement or an extended solo stretch in a harsh environment such as the Arctic. It is possible to connect, to find solace beyond ourselves, even when we are alone. Something that is quite insightful in this pandemic ridded world where we have been forced into long isolation.
There are also ideas for how we can use this knowledge to improve our lives. Eliminating solitary confinement, better reintegration of veterans, and knowing where the emergency exits are before an emergency happens are just a sample of the author's suggestions. One example: People tend not to evacuate a building promptly on hearing an alarm, but to mill around and see whether other people take it seriously. Resisting this social tendency could have saved many lives on September 11, 2001.
What rocked
The shocking fact that the people in our lives affect every aspect of our behavior in ways that we are often not consciously aware of.
Many of the stories are engaging and even thought-provoking - i.e., 'revolution at Tahrir Square' or 'the trial of Adolf Eichmann'.
Elegant and straightforward style and his easy conversational manner. I found it absolutely riveting and it was a quick and enjoyable read.
Conclusion
Though we think of ourselves as free individuals, our choices are influenced by others – and the scary thing is that we don’t realize it. At the same time, we are considerably diminished when we are disengaged from others.
For anyone looking to better understand social psychology and the impact we have on one another, The Power of Others by Michael Bond is a great read.