What’s Your Threshold?

photo credit pixabay.com

Fascinating broadcast last week on This American Life about how hard it is for most of us to cross a threshold and go over into another set of ideas or behaviors.  So many of us (and I have to include myself in this, much as I hate to do so) are timid. We have to see that others are crossing the threshold too, and then maybe we’ll do it.  And sometimes this is a good thing, as it helps to preserve the social order.  So, on this segment of the program hosted by best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell there’s the example given of mob behavior, especially riots. Psychologists have always tried to puzzle out why a group of people will do things that they’d never do on their own.

There’s been this theory that somehow people’s beliefs change when they are in a mob, so that they suddenly believe that throwing rocks through windows is okay.  But that idea doesn’t really make sense; it implies some sort of sudden irrational groupthink.  People often express great regret after participation in a activity that violates their beliefs.  So did their beliefs change while they were in the mob, and then change back?  That idea doesn’t make any sense if you think about it: surely humans aren’t that malleable.

Instead, Gladwell interviews a sociologist named Mark Granovetter who has pioneered a theory he calls the “Threshold Model of Collective Behavior.”  To me this theory makes perfect sense, not the least, as I said above, because it describes how I often behave.  I’m a high-threshold person; in other words, I have to think that lots of other people agree with me before I feel comfortable changing my mind and especially speaking out about an issue.  The lower your threshold, the fewer people you have to have on your side.  As Granovetter puts it, “Your threshold is the number of people who have to do something before you join in.”

The terminology is a bit confusing here, as we also use the term “high threshold” in relationship to pain.  If you have a high threshold there, then you resist pain well because you don’t feel it as much. So you’re less likely to give in to it.  In the area of how others influence us it gets a little trickier:  in the riot it can be good to be a high-threshold person, because you’ll have to see lots of other people throwing rocks before you’ll do so.  You won’t join in with just one other person.  You and your friends will retreat, or call the police, or tell the stone-throwers to stop.  So that’s okay.  But . . . what if you’re the only one who wants the riot to stop? Or the name-calling?  Or the drinking and driving? That’s the other side of the coin. You have to have allies or you won’t stand up for your beliefs.   If you’re a high-threshold person, you’ll stand there twiddling your fingers while the bad behavior goes on, and at a certain point you will very possibly collapse and join in.  If you’re a teenager and you’re in a car with your friends and they’re all laughing about going way over the speed limit, you have to have a low threshold to say, “Pull over and let me out of the car.”

To make this whole threshold idea even more complicated, the timid, high-threshold person can sometimes be influenced by just one other person, if that person has a strong enough personality.  The threshold can be breached by just that one voice.  There is a phenomenon labeled “folie a deux,” in which two people do something together that neither of them would have done alone, or, probably more accurately, when the weaker person is sucked into the delusions and psychosis of the stronger. (Not that the weaker person doesn’t have a choice in the matter, just to be clear.)  It seems to be the case that the Columbine massacre was the result of a folie a deux:  that Dylan Klebold allowed himself, chose to allow himself, to be pulled into the dark, violent world of Eric Harris and to participate in Eric’s horrible plan but that he would never have come up with and carried out the massacre on his own.

In my own life, to get back to a more normal frame of reference, I’ve gotten a bit tickled with myself (and a bit saddened, I must admit) as I’ve watched myself come to certain conclusions about the upcoming election.  I’m not going to discuss those conclusions here; if you’re interested in what they are you can go to my “Personal and Political” page or directly to my personal facebook page (which is separate from my author page).  Who I’m going to vote for isn’t the point here.  What I’m kind of ashamed of is that I said very little about my vote outside a safe circle of friends.  When I finally felt that, as little of an effect as it made have, I had to speak out, what was my tipping point?  It was that many others had come to the same conclusion, among them people whom I could point to as authorities.  I couldn’t stand up for what I honestly believed until I saw that others were standing up, too.  And then I still thought I was being daring and brave.  Ha!  I was just following the crowd, although I sincerely think that in this particular situation it’s a good crowd.

I have said to myself over the past few years that I need to stop worrying so much about what other people think, so perhaps this election year is going to help me grow a little more backbone.  We can only hope!