Following the crowd

Do humans have an innate nature to 'follow the crowd'?

I was thinking about this and the amount of ridiculous trends that have occurred throughout the years. For example, when I was 15 or 16 those hideous ugg boots were all the rage, you just had to have them!! I went out and spent all the money I got at Christmas and my savings on a pair of 'REAL' :rolleyes: uggs. They are absolutely rotten yokes but I wanted them and thought I was the bees knees at the time. Every second person I knew had a pair. Then there was the Elsa dolls, remember that Christmas they sold out and every parent with a daughter who hadn't purchased the doll was having a mini heart attack? Effective marketing perhaps, but I do think humans like to conform and if enough people start wearing saucepans on their heads tomorrow, you'd get every second person wearing a saucepan on their head after a while!

There was a thing on telly about this recently, I was only half paying attention to it at the time but it was talking about how humans will alter their behaviour if they are part of a group in order to conform. Say if a group of people all stop and stare aimlessly into the sky, passerby's will also stop to see what they're looking at! Another example, was of a group of people who were asked a simple mathematical sum. All of them were actors with one stranger thrown in the mix. They all answered the question incorrectly and the stranger answered incorrectly as well. WTF?

They went on to discuss how people who would normally be calm and non confrontational can change their demeanor in a protest situation or when in a group that is violent and confrontational in order to fit in. You can see this played up in soap operas and the likes, but I have no doubt that it also happens in real life.

What do you guys think?