by Tom Ridges, CEO, Herdify
There’s a reason The Celebrity Traitors had the entire country in a chokehold. Beyond the cloaks, daggers, and Claudia Winkleman’s fingerless gloves, it’s basically a live social experiment in human behaviour and herd mentality.
Michael Sheen, the lovable self-styled leader, even said the words in his pre-game interview: “So, as far as strategy, do you vote with the herd or stay hidden within?”
With the launch attracting more than 15 million viewers, it’s obvious that the show’s popularity captures the public’s attention. But we weren’t just watching who could keep a straight face. We were watching how fast a half-baked opinion turns into gospel truth and just how uncomfortable it feels to be the odd one out.
Parents, business leaders and marketers, you should be taking notes.
How do opinions become a movement?
Anyone who’s watched the roundtable knows the routine.
One contestant has a hunch: “They didn’t look at me during breakfast.” Another nods along: “Now you mention it, they did pour that tea suspiciously.” Within three minutes, half the room is convinced they’re a traitor.
It didn’t start with evidence. It started with a feeling. But when two or three people validate it, the theory gains momentum. We’re birds of a feather, always flocking together. Essentially, it’s just humans copying humans.
There are two powerful forces at play here: confirmation bias, our ability to selectively listen to evidence that supports our existing theories and views, and social contagion, or more colloquially, ‘herd mentality’.
Faced with uncertainty, thinking for ourselves feels risky, while copying the crowd feels like the safest option. Once a collective narrative picks up speed, cold, hard facts rarely stand a chance.
Why going against the crowd matters
Watch The Traitors for long enough, and you’ll see the counter-move. Every so often, someone pushes back. They refuse to go along with the group; they point out the flawed logic; they back an alternative theory. Sometimes it backfires and they get themselves banished. But sometimes they flip the entire room.
And this lone wolf is an evolutionary necessity. If nobody ever tried anything new, we’d still be living in trees, scared of the beasts patrolling below but many brave souls jumped down to fight and eventually we worked out how to win by working together. And this desire to go first lives in all of us. In some contexts of our lives, or the games we play, we’ll speak up, try a new product or do something others are not, but most of the time we don’t; we stay in the trees like everybody else.
And the fact we exist in both camps means influence is still at play, even in the first movers. We call it countervailing influence when a different view or behaviour pushes against the desired behaviour or established behaviour of the group and, after a certain threshold, we can no longer hold out. Round the table, we’ve seen arguments crushed with one factless rebuttal. There was no logic to the argument, just social isolation.
For brands, the lesson isn’t just “go mass” or “go niche.” It’s figuring out where your herds are forming.
From the castle to the real world
This copying behaviour plays out in real life. Imagine being in a new city; you’re hungry and you stumble across two restaurants. Both of them are open; one is buzzing, the other is empty. With no other information to go on, most of you will opt for the busy one.
This isn’t irrational. It’s safe.
It’s the same for your brand. Whether a consumer chooses you depends on whether they see you as the busy or empty restaurant. Category leaders have the benefit of being the busy restaurant nearly everywhere, a luxury most brands don’t have.
But let’s change the scenario above. You’re now in a neighbourhood you know and know the empty restaurant has the best food and service for miles around. Now you’re the first through the door, signalling to others it’s OK to come in. The more people that come, the more others will follow. Restaurants are not blind to this and it’s why they seat the first customers at the window.
Like the round table, our brand preferences are largely a product of the behaviours of others around us.
But business still spends an awful lot of time obsessing over details of the individual, like age and salary or what they had for breakfast, ignoring the collective influence of the group around them.
The opportunity is to identify these hidden connections, trace how opinions spread, and recognise the exact moments when individual curiosity becomes collective conviction. Rather than simply counting impressions on social platforms, brands must start asking a more useful question: where are my customers influencing others offline?
Influence isn’t something you can buy off the shelf. It’s built when behaviours are seen, repeated, and socially validated in the real world. The good news is, it’s already happening for your brand. You’ve just got to find it.
The roundtable in the Scottish Highlands might be a game of deception. But the social dynamics playing out across that table are as real as it gets.
In the end, the brands that win won’t simply be the loudest. They’ll be the ones that understand who influences whom, where trust actually lives, and how to get the right herd moving in their direction.
