Why do we do the things we do?

Wow!

I just finished reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and it really got my wheels turning. Give it a read if you have a spare moment. There was one concept that really intrigued me in the book I wanted to explore today. Basically Gladwell points out how likely we are to do something based on what other people are doing. In the book he gives several examples but I want to tell you about the subways in New York City in the early 1990's. At the time crime was rampant with graffiti everywhere and hundreds of people a day jumping the turnstiles to ride the subway. The police had long given up on the people refusing to pay the fare because there were so many and they figured it was a trivial crime. They appointed a man to help clean up the subway system. The first thing he did was paint all of the cars and make a vow to not allow any graffiti on the train. If a car was tagged with graffiti they took it off the track and painted it the same night so it never saw more than a few hours on the cars. He also told the local police to crack down on the fare jumpers. They set up a remote station and pulled people out of the line by groups of 5. They were able to ticket and process these individuals within an hour and were finding all kinds of other crimes and warrants within these groups. What I thought was interesting was that some people not paying for the fares were criminals, drug addicts and thieves. The rest of the people were just commuters, people who would have otherwise paid had they not seen droves of other people not paying for their fares. In short, these small changes were enough to change the entire subway system into something safer and profitable. The subways began seeing more inflow of money and fewer crime to almost no graffiti. 

We did a social experiment at the gym one boring day after someone left one door propped open when coming in. We noticed that even though there are two doors people are more likely to walk through the open door. We thought this might be a coincidence so we tested it out and observed for an hour. In that hour even though the gym was increasing in walk-in traffic people were literally waiting for a line of people to walk through the open door rather than to open the closed door. Are we lazy? My assumption is no. We tend to see others doing something and inadvertently follow suit. This entire book explores this concept. Why do some trends catch on fire when others drown in their wakes? I so badly want to find that next awesome workout routine that catches fire! For now I think I'll stick to the small stuff, you know, the graffiti on the subway cars so to speak.