As studies have conclusively shown[2], the three types of people in any social setting are:
- Leaders
- Joiners
- Followers
Leaders are the people who make the magic happen. They're the people who come up with a plan to {go bowling/make a 75 mile White Castle run at 2:00am/wear fake mustaches to a New Year's Eve party/you get the idea}. Leaders have big ideas and the self-confidence to put them out there. They have a degree of charisma that makes their plan not only seem like a great idea, but the most natural thing in the world. Sure, let's eat at each of Milwaukee's top 5 pizza places in one day. Why wouldn't we?
Joiners are a less crazy bunch than the Leaders. They don't frequently find themselves with a wild plan. Where they may lack in imagination, they make up for in enthusiasm. Leaders wouldn't get anything going without a solid core of Joiners backing them up. When one person stands in front of a group and suggests stealing a roll of toilet paper from a gas station bathroom and taking pictures of it around town, you drop a couple of quarters in his cup and keep walking. But when a handful of Joiners stand up with him and suggest gas stations with lax security and local monuments that are just asking for a good photographin'—this marks the beginning of Social Critical Mass.
Of course, you can't achieve truly critical mass until the Followers get in. Followers are the ones who go along because it seems like everyone else is. Followers are not dumb sheep who just blindly go along. There are any number of reasons to be a follower. Perhaps the person honestly has no preference in the matter being discussed. Maybe they aren't completely comfortable with this social group and don't want to stick out. Maybe they just don't like making waves. Maybe they trust that the leaders and joiners are making a good decision.
Preliminary research seems to indicate that a roughly pyramid-shaped distribution occurs[Figure A].
Fig. A
It has been suggested that most people play each of these roles in different situations[3]. In fact, the biggest area of contemporary research in the field of Critical Social Mass revolves around why this dynamic forms. Is a specific balance of social types required for a group to form critical mass (and thus only groups with the correct balance emerge to be studied)? Perhaps when there is an imbalance the group falls apart. Perhaps the excess members of any particular type remove themselves voluntarily from the larger group. Or do members of each type shift to another type to maintain the balance? One theory goes so far as to speculate that the groups aren't divided sharply at all; that "types" are simply an illusion created by the statistical distribution of personalities within a social group.
Agree? Disagree? Comments are open!
[1] Aaron, 2011.
[2] Aaron, 2011.
[3] Aaron, 2011
