Wagons come and go, pass you by and try to recruit you to climb on top of them and go for a ride, even though you may just feel like strolling around and observing for a while, not willing to commit to a wagon just jet. Climbing on onto one wagon effectively means you are going where this particular wagon is going and missing all other routes. Yet, wagons have wheels and are therefore moveable. But bandwagons of group thinking are much more stationary, they are more of a mental real estate that you can move into our out of.

We are all full of biases and if you think you are excused of that that’s a bias in itself – a blind-spot bias in which you fail to recognize the prepressed decisions and beliefs you’re already holding in any situation and that govern most of your “conscious decisions”. Habits and categorizations are necessary of course, they save mental energy they are what keeps you sane most of the time, but they are also what often makes you wrong or not as right as you could be if your brain didn’t take theislazy route to the solution. Thinking clearly is hard, really thinking and not just playing out your biases and pathologies in thousands of different situations is hard. You seriously need to train yourself to become aware of your biases, use them to your advantage when timing is crucial and to silence them when you have a chance to explore more and come to a better solution.

The bandwagon effect is a specifically dangerous one that simultaneously keeps the societies and groups tied together and ruins the fabric of independent thought. It says the probability that one person will adopt a certain belief increases based by the number of other people who already hold that belief. It’s a form of group think which in its milder forms makes large scale meetings unproductive because nothing is ever challenged and resolved, why you’ll become complacent in order to not be shunned, buy popular things, and in a scarier instances it explodes and is what transforms a crowd into a raging mob. You’re vulnerable to this, you can get sucked in by the energy and opinion of the group and having and external locus of identity makes it more likely because you’re more agreeable and constantly compare your value to the value others ascribe to you. The more you agree the more you’ll be accepted because the social bond becomes more important that the matter at hand

It is not all bad, bandwagon thinking gave you traditions and common beliefs, it gave you the power to unite and fight when the idea was right and worth it, but it’s a dangerous double sided sword that can in time, if left unexamined, lead to giving up your sovereignty of thought for the sake of the most popular opinion being confused as yours. Most popular never was nor will be the definition of right, actually on most occasions it just means the easiest most trotted route with less unknowns on the road. Ain’t that a boring way to be? Get off the wagon and go on foot, find shortcuts and scenic routes, go at it alone and may you find something that coincides with a specific wagon, join them then, not because you had to having no mind of your own, but because you want to.