My Social Experiment

Most people will be familiar with the phrase “sheep mentality”. Sheep mentality is when people do something purely because someone before them has already done it. It is particularly prevalent in schools, where people will fool themselves into thinking a movie is good, even when it is not, purely because their friends said that they liked it. This article is designed to explore sheep mentality among humans. The catch is that this article won’t talk about sheep mentality and its presence in humanity, it will simply serve as an illustration of this mentality.

Basically, if this article is published, which I sincerily hope it will be, I will send word to all my family and friends about the article. I will ask them to carry out two very simple tasks. The first will be to tell all their friends and family about the article (and their friends and family etc) in order to get them to carry out the second task as well. The second task, for everyone, will be to write a comment on the article. It doesn’t have to be some beautiful, well-structured comment. A simple “I posted here @ 8:47″ will do fine. It is simply to see whether people will visit a site and leave a seemingly insignificant comment, purely because someone else before them did the exact same thing.

And so I find myself appealing to you, my readers, to also carry out this task. It is rather simple. All you need to do is tell people to make an endless chain, getting everyone to comment on this article and then spread the word to everyone they can. The objective is to see how many people will actually carry this out. There is, of course, the chance that people won’t send the task on out of fear, that the article may have a virus or something, but I hope that everyone will overcome those fears and work together to see just how far this social experiment could go. If you think that this is a good idea, why not spread the word yourself? All you have to do is post a comment, then send an email to your address book telling them to do what you have just done.

This is your chance to be part of something bigger. Grasp it with both hands!