The conference room is almost full as the people try to get the last seats while the session is restarting after the coffee break. The speaker is trying to convey his motivation. After a few words he presents a bar graph showing the number of publications on his topic as a function of time showing a huge (seemingly exponential) increase in the last few years. "There is a lot of clever people working on this field" he assesses confidently with an Iamoneofthem attitude.



This kind of phenomenon, called "social proof" is not new. Stanley Milgram and other social psychologists identified it already in 1968 in a series of social experiments. The key is the assumption that if lots of people do something it should be because there is something interesting in it. Therefore, the crowd becomes more influential when it is bigger. As James Surowiecki points out: "every additional person is a proof that something important is happening", "The strategy of following the others if things are uncertain is reasonable but if too many people adopt that strategy, it stops being sensible and the group stops being smart".

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