Herd Behavior
The Basic Idea
It’s a familiar scene in a nature documentary. Thousands of wildebeests are fleeing together from the pursuit of a lion. Aerial footage follows the wildebeests moving together, leaving a trail of dust preceded by the thundering of countless hooves. It’s an epic image, and we marvel in the scope of the herd acting as a single unit. We might think how different we are, as individualized human beings, acting on our own accord. But with a closer look, we may realize that we are more like the wildebeests than we first believe.
It’s no secret that humans are social creatures. Our motives in presenting an idealized social identity to our peers guide much of our behavior, and although some of these social influences can result in our attempt to project individuality (at least in North America), there are some situations where we do the opposite – we follow the herd; our heads go down and we do what everyone else is doing.
It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
