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Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World
Tina Rosenberg

“Our product is a lifestyle,” Marovic´ said. “The movement isn’t about the issues—it’s about my identity. It’s about being cool. We’re trying to make politics sexy.”
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The more important and deeply rooted the behavior, the less impact information has and the more people close their minds to messages that scare them.
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Instead, they aim at what people want now: to belong, to be part of the in crowd, to be loved and admired and respected. These programs change personal behavior through social pressure. They offer people a new and desirable club to join—a peer group so strong and persuasive that the individual adopts a new identity.
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In his classic work The Ego and Its Defenses, Henry P. Laughlin describes twenty-two major and twenty-six minor ego defenses.
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“When things are changing, new or in flux, people won’t look inside themselves for answers—all they see is ambiguity,” he said. “They look outside, to legitimately constituted experts and to peers. That provides a shortcut way of determining what they should do in that situation without having to get smart on the topic.”
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People adjust their behavior to fit the message sent by their physical surroundings about what a neighborhood finds acceptable.
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“The key is not to normalize behavior but to marginalize it,”
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Cialdini proposed revising the Iron Eyes Cody spot to show the bag of trash landing in a clean environment, thus demonstrating that the social norm is one of environmental protection and the litterer is isolated in violating it.
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Word-of-mouth-marketing experts say that it isn’t simply good products that inspire customers to text or call or e-mail their friends. It’s about the way that product affects the customer’s identity. “I would share because it makes me look good to be part of the hip group,” said Andy Sernovitz, a word-of-mouth guru in Chicago. “It’s the Ritz problem. You go stay at the Ritz. It’s wonderful—the food is great, the room is perfect. But you never call a friend to tell them about it. But say you go stay at the Doubletree for $79 a night, and when you check in, they have cookies. Now you call someone—they have cookies! “With traditional politics,
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is that people will talk about a product when they can claim some stake in it: “If it’s something new and different and I’m there at the beginning, I can belong to this and feel special. I change the ownership. When I tell my friend about something new, it conveys status to me.”
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Information rarely motivates people; identification is much more effective.
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bunch of guys, or BOG. It is the bunch-of-guys theory of terrorism.
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As is always true with the social cure, the information itself counts less than who delivers it, and how.
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With almost everything that people need to be nagged about, the nagging is much more effective if it comes with information about what others are doing.
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calls it “peer proof” instead of “peer pressure”—but
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Gene Sharp’s mantra: Power resides in the consent given by people in society.
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