The Education Of Augie Merasty is an odd and absorbing memoir. The subject and his writer met only twice. Many details are unverified. There is no beginning, middle or end. Yet the book documents a dark corner of our nature that psychologists call “social proof.”
Imagine you are walking on a desolate beach and spot a lone swimmer in distress. Would you call out? Of course you would. You are a good person. Now imagine you are among hundreds on a very crowded beach and spot the same sudden drowning. Then what? Here no answer is required. Canadians drown at crowded beaches every summer.
This is “social proof,” a type of group think where individuals seek cues from those around them on how to react to upsetting developments. “Very often an emergency is not obviously an emergency,” psychologist Robert Cialdini of Arizona State University wrote in a 1984 bestseller Influence: The Psychology Of Persuasion. “In times of such uncertainty, the natural tendency is to look around at the actions of others for clues. We can learn, from the way other witnesses are reacting, whether or not the event is an emergency.”