A recurring theme on the blog, the corresponding Facebook page and Twitter feed, over the course of the year has been exposing #Culturalinertia and discussing how it affects us. You can read those previous entries here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.
Today, as the year nears its end, I’d like to put forth for specific consideration a slightly different type of message.
Instead of looking at specific examples of the phenomenon, let’s look at the major cause of it and the best tool available to us to over come it.
One of the major causes of Cultural Inertia is termed “Pluralistic Ignorance.”
Pluralistic ignorance occurs when people erroneously infer that they feel differently from their peers, even though they are behaving similarly.
This ignorance can be reinforced or overcome by properly applying the concepts of “Social Proof.”
Social proof is based on the idea of normative social influence, which states that people will conform in order to be liked by, [people] similar to [them] or accepted by the influencer (or society).