Social proof: how it works and why public resonance matters in protecting nature

Readers often ask me in letters how public resonance works in practice. And lately there have been many commenters taking a passive stance: “What’s the point of talking about problems? Resonance won’t help you.” Of course, I understand that such people haven’t previously taken part in protecting nature and have no idea which bills have been slowed down by public resonance, or that any task must be approached as complex, structured work. Public demand—when a huge number of people insist on solving problems—is only one part of the mechanism in the struggle for nature. But in the simplified understanding of the average person, most actions get distorted and take on the same simplified form!

And yet the overwhelming majority of people understand everything perfectly well, evaluate it, and take part in our projects. That is precisely why we succeed not only in gradually uniting more and more defenders of nature, but also in influencing truly serious problems.

Today I want to talk about this. I want to tell you about social proof. There is a well-known American social psychologist—one of the most popular researchers of persuasion and influence—Robert Cialdini. Many years ago I read his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion—I highly recommend it. In it, he neatly systematized the key mechanisms used in advertising, sales, political communication, and everyday interactions.

So, “social proof” is one of the principles of influence described by Cialdini. Roughly speaking, the principle can be summed up as: “If many people do it, then it’s correct and normal.” In other words, it’s the mechanism by which a person looks to the behavior of others to figure out what the right course of action is.

Cialdini conducted his own study involving hotels—you’ve probably seen those signs that say something like: “Hang up your towel—we won’t wash it every day to save water and electricity. This will help protect the environment.”

For years, guests ignored these signs. In other words, “for nature” or “think about saving the planet” simply doesn’t work! Cialdini decided to test the principle of social proof and ran an experiment: hotels began posting a message like, “Most guests who stayed in this room reused their bed linen,” pointing people toward what the majority of guests were already doing.

Half the rooms had the old signs, and half had the new ones. The effect was huge—social proof works: people who saw the new signs began to follow the majority in large numbers. Later, hotels around the world started integrating this approach, and Cialdini himself said:

“All these marketing minds at Sheraton, Four Seasons, and Ritz-Carlton—why didn’t they come up with this? It’s because you have to look at the social science data on what might be available to you there.”

And we, Allies, in protecting wildlife need to study social processes. We need to understand science and the movement of public thought! Then we will definitely be able to change the world.

So. As you’ve understood, people tend to follow the opinion of the majority, and the direction of movement is shaped by the principle of social proof. Recently, we launched a Public Initiative after hunters carried out real torture on a she-wolf in the forests of Yakutia. Our initiative helps focus people’s attention: the more participants there are, the stronger the effect of social proof becomes. Each new participant sees more and more people and begins to share the majority view. In this way, collective action turns into a force—motivating people to work together to achieve a solution to the problem.

Without the Public Initiative, without social proof, there will be no driving force of thought. That is why every time we must gather more and more people around problems! That is public resonance.

When a person is alone or a group is too small, there will be little action. Back in 1978, the scholar Mark Granovetter described threshold models of collective behavior. Each person’s behavior depends on the number of others who have already spoken out. This is the very “threshold of support”: if there are few voices of protest, an individual sees no reason to join in. But when there are enough of them, the obviousness of the problem begins to grow sharply.

I’ll simplify. The first complaint to the prosecutor’s office is almost guaranteed to go unnoticed. But thousands of signatures and mass appeals turn the situation upside down. Granovetter described this phenomenon very well: it is critically important for a person to see a sufficient number of like-minded people in order to risk speaking up about the problem themselves.

And then it starts to work as social proof for the authorities themselves—when an ordinary official or a representative of law enforcement must respond to our appeals, they see a truly large number of people, and it triggers in exactly the same way as Cialdini’s hotel linen experiment: the problem needs to be addressed not because it will save nature, but because everyone considers it important and is talking about it.

I think I explained it clearly. That’s how our society works! By the way, on top of all this there is also a fear of isolation—if I’m not mistaken, experts call it the “spiral of silence.” The idea is that up to a certain point people may stay silent out of fear of ending up in the minority. But when resonance passes a critical mass, the reverse effect kicks in—no one wants to fall out of the general direction of public thought. As a result, more and more people join the discussion, and even if earlier they would have confidently ignored the issue, now—seeing everyone else—they are ready to act and demand a solution.

That is why these mechanisms lie at the heart of our Public Initiatives. We are already seeing extremely high effectiveness in our work, Allies.

Now, briefly about how the reaction is launched further—what the resonance created by society leads to.

As you know, we have mass media, and more recently also the neural algorithms of social networks, which independently determine which topics should be considered important and what to talk about right now. When a huge number of people create social proof and the resonance becomes truly massive, it gets picked up by search engines, social media trends, and the news. An impulse appears! And it is precisely at this moment that we have a key opportunity to influence the problem through political structures.

Remember how we sent mass inquiries to political parties? Every party tries to gain ratings within the system, and this can be done only through public support. If there is a mass problem and society demands a solution, political forces use it in their campaigning. Parties start including these issues in their programs, deputies ask questions of ministers—often critically. For parties, it’s important to support society here; otherwise you won’t gain ratings.

This creates pressure inside the system, and it is forced to act. Here I would recall the words of the Speaker of the Parliament of Kazakhstan, Nurlan Nigmatulin, who said: “We need to stop the practice where only public resonance forces officials to hear society’s concerns.” That was back in 2021; I remembered his words because at the time Kazakhstan was discussing the issue of pollution of the Caspian Sea. And we were reporting the mass deaths of seals on the shores of the Caspian. At the same time, thousands of animal carcasses were being found on agricultural fields not far from the sea coast. And while we were fighting in Russia, our Allies were pushing for change in Kazakhstan. It was public resonance that made it possible to secure approval of the ratification of the Protocol on protecting the Caspian Sea from pollution from land-based sources. The most important thing there was the creation of a mechanism for public participation in measures to protect the Caspian Sea.

The authorities react when they see mass resonance; otherwise ratings will collapse and be pulled away by other political parties. If there is no reaction to the public’s social proof, officials lose their positions and face real consequences for their careers later on—simply because if you don’t support society, others will, and your “comfortable seat” will be taken a bit later.

I think the material has already turned out quite extensive. We could separately talk about how states and transnational corporations use social engineering! Perhaps we’ll discuss that in future materials. For now, it was extremely important for me to explain to you, Allies, the importance of Public Initiatives and our work.

Every time a problem arises, become part of social proof and help pass it on further. Even if your surroundings resist and refuse to recognize problems, it only means that we are still too few. When resonance becomes massive, those who refused to see the problems will develop the classic fear pattern of “being left on the sidelines” of the direction of everyone else’s thinking. And then they will be ready to act.

We continue the Mission! Fight for Life!

© PAVEL PASHKOV