My favorite movie star wears Chanel. I, too, will wear Chanel. All the cool kids live in Brooklyn. I, too, just moved to Brooklyn. Everyone knows houses and tech stocks simply cannot drop in value. Let’s buy some on credit. Everyone is buying tulips. I, too, will buy tulips. Ditto Electric Vehicles. Ditto Florida swampland.
From 30,000 feet, these statements sound crazy. But it’s just human nature.
Everyone copies what they see as successful behavior. It’s a survival instinct. Fueled primarily by emotion and rationalized by using logic and reason later.
It’s called the social proof effect.
We do what we see others doing. We go where the crowd goes. We mirror our friends, and we mirror the close, the powerful, and the many.
Tony Robbins argues that two of our deepest human needs are certainty and uncertainty.
We need to feel safe, and we need to feel surprised. The herd satisfies the first one. Following the crowd reduces risk. If everyone’s buying tulips, you’re not the idiot who bought tulips alone.
But variety is also a need. And when everyone is doing the same thing, the person doing something different becomes the most interesting thing in the room. This is the contrast effect.
As Charlie Munger argued in his famous Psychology of Human Misjudgment speech, we don’t tend to measure things in absolute terms but by comparing them to other things. And the thing we spend the most time comparing is other humans.
Recently, amid the deluge of A.I. slop, companies have been turning to something ancient.
Writers and storytellers. The real kind. As one article put it, “The rise of slopaganda is fueling a surprising tech hiring boom.”
Adobe is hiring an “AI Evangelist” to drive its artificial intelligence storytelling. Anthropic tripled its comms team last year. OpenAI has several open comms jobs with salaries over $400,000.
As Gen-AI made mediocre storytelling cheap and accessible, real storytelling has become rarer. And rarer means more attention grabbing and therefore more valuable.
We should watch carefully though. The moment everyone starts hiring real writers, real writers become the new bandwagon. The contrast effect doesn’t sit still. It’s always moving.
The question to ask is always: what is everyone else ignoring right now?
This is how it usually goes.
Every bandwagon has a sign painted on it: “This way lies mediocrity and obscurity. The other way lies opportunity.”
The herd offers safety. The contrarian offers something rarer. And people are far hungrier for rare than they usually admit.
