Understanding Zebras

To conform or not to conform? That is the question

The thing about reaction videos

Before we get to zebras, let’s talk about reaction videos. If you think about it, reaction videos form a significant chunk of the content created on YouTube. What is a reaction video you might ask? Well they are just videos of people watching other people do things. A typical reaction video has a close up of the people watching their screens with a small rectangle to show us in real time what they are watching. These videos come in all sorts of shapes and forms - movie trailer reactions, ‘try not to laugh’ challenges, meme reviews and most commonly video game streaming. So many YouTubers have literally made a career out of streaming / reacting to video games or other types of content. So today we will try to understand why this is such a phenomenon and think about what this means for our everyday social interactions. We will then understand the role of empathy and conformity in making us like these videos.

Let’s start with the OG streamer PewDiePie. For the uninitiated, PewDiePie is considered to be the most successful YouTuber of all time with 110 million subscribers as on date and he started his career streaming scary video games. In a 2015 interview (around the time he had 40 million subscribers) he talks about why he thinks so many people are interested in watching him play video games all day:

PewDiePie: I think no one watches me to get better at games, people watch me just to be entertained and feel like they are hanging out

Interviewer: …that you are like their friend…they’re hanging out with their friend..

PewDiePie: In a sense yeah, that’s part of the appeal…

‘Feels like hanging out with a friend’. Let’s break that down further. Specifically lets look the ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ aspects of that sentence. Let’s tackle the ‘feeling’ part first. In the 90’s, a group of Italian researchers discovered what they called a mirror neuron. They noticed that the same neurons that light up when a monkey reaches for food also light up when they see a human reach for food. Mirror neurons try to explain why we feel empathy and are seen as the neural architecture that supports social understanding. While the existence of these neurons in humans is still debated, empathy itself helps us understand why we like these videos. Most reaction videos are neither short nor always funny. Their consumption stems from recognisable emotion. Clinical psychologists say that when you watch someone react with a big response to something, it is much easier to empathise with them as you know exactly what they are feeling. Humans crave understandable emotion because that is how we form social bonds. However there is one other phenomenon (the ‘thinking’ part) at play here - conformity or the desire to fit in.

The Asch test

Solomon Asch, a pioneer in social psychology conducted his famous social conformity experiment in 1951. The experiment was simple, Asch put the subject in a room with seven ‘actors’ and gave them the following task. The subject would think all the others are participants like themselves. They were all to identify which of the lines in exhibit 2 are of the same length as the one in exhibit 1. The exercise was repeated with similar exhibits with lines of varying lengths where the actors would all give out consistent (and pre-planned) wrong answers. It was found that 75% of the subjects conformed at least once and 25% did not conform at all.

When the participants were interviewed after the experiment, most of them agreed to have gone along with the rest of the group even though they believed their answer was wrong. The study showed how people conformed for two major reasons - because they want to fit into the group and because they believe that the group is somehow better informed.

This is also why some TV shows have laughing tracks. It is because we tend to laugh if the people around us are laughing. This happens even if we don’t get the joke or even if it is not actually that funny. While these might be harmless side effects of conformity, there are some dangerous aspects too. Enter the ‘bystander effect’. The story of Kitty Genovese illustrates this the best and it has become a staple for psychology 101 classes around the world.

In the early hours of March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old bartender, was stabbed outside the apartment building where she lived in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens in New York City, New York, United States. Two weeks after the murder, The New York Times published an article erroneously claiming that 38 witnesses saw or heard the attack, and that none of them called the police or came to her aid. (Wikipedia)

It was later found out that there was no evidence for the presence of 38 witnesses or for the fact that none of them called for help. The conformity here was not among the witnesses but within the reporting of the story which was a result of information cascade where no one investigated the source. As Michael Stevens puts it, there is a saying in journalism: some stories are too good to check.

Camouflaging like a zebra

Nurturing non-conformity can be difficult and can be seen as a disruption to business continuity. Often times our teams do not lack creativity but simply the tools that enable people to speak up. Ensuring challenger safety can be a good starting point but it is only the bare minimum. Adam Grant argues that a great way to foster non-conformity is to ‘kill the company’. Asking questions like ‘how do you think we can be put out of business’ puts people on the offence and people are more creative while on the offence than defence. Non-conformists are essential because they drive creativity, take risks and act as mini change agents across the organisation. The spectrum of forces pushing us to conform or express our individuality are however both necessary. We would like to leave you with the following thought:

Ever wondered how zebras camouflage with their bright white stripes? Well they do not attempt to do so with the environment but they do this against each other within the herd. Given a herd of zebras, predators like lions cannot focus on a single zebra to attack and capture. They need to identify a specific target to be able to hunt. Individual zebras blend with the herd and become too fuzzy for the lions to concentrate upon. In other words they survive by conforming. Biologists studying particular zebras also had the same problem. They were unable to track the activities of a specific zebra for their studies. So they decided to either mark it with a red paint spot or put a clip on its ear. You can guess what happened next, that particular zebra got killed as it became an easy target for the lions. When you make yourself colourful and when you stand out, be prepared to face some lions along the way.