The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (36 page)

In other words, peer pressure.

Peer pressure—and the social habits that encourage people to conform to group expectations—is difficult to describe, because it often differs in form and expression from person to person. These social habits aren’t so much one consistent pattern as dozens of individual habits that ultimately cause everyone to move in the same direction.

The habits of peer pressure, however, have something in common. They often spread through weak ties. And they gain their authority through communal expectations. If you ignore the social obligations of your neighborhood, if you shrug off the expected patterns of your community, you risk losing your social standing. You endanger your access to many of the social benefits that come from joining the country club, the alumni association, or the church in the first place.

In other words, if you don’t give the caller looking for a job a helping hand, he might complain to his tennis partner, who might mention those grumblings to someone in the locker room who you were hoping to attract as a client, who is now less likely to return your call because you have a reputation for not being a team player. On a playground, peer pressure is dangerous. In adult life, it’s how business gets done and communities self-organize.

Such peer pressure, on its own, isn’t enough to sustain a movement. But when the strong ties of friendship and the weak ties of peer pressure merge, they create incredible momentum. That’s when widespread social change can begin.

To see how the combination of strong and weak ties can propel a movement, fast forward to nine years
after
Rosa Parks’s arrest, when hundreds of young people volunteered to expose themselves to deadly risks for the civil rights crusade.

In 1964, students from across the country—many of them whites from Harvard, Yale, and other northern universities—applied for something called the “Mississippi Summer Project.” It was a ten-week program devoted to
registering black voters in the South.
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The project came to be known as Freedom Summer, and many who applied were aware it would be dangerous. In the months before the program started, newspapers and magazines were filled with articles predicting violence (which proved tragically accurate when, just a week after it began, white vigilantes killed three volunteers outside Longdale, Mississippi). The threat of harm kept many students from participating in the Mississippi Summer Project, even after they applied. More than a thousand applicants were accepted into Freedom Summer, but when it came time to head south in June,
more than three hundred of those invited to participate decided to stay home.
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In the 1980s, a sociologist at the University of Arizona named Doug McAdam began wondering if it was possible to figure out why some people had
participated in Freedom Summer and others withdrew.
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He started by reading 720 of the applications students had submitted decades earlier. Each was five pages long. Applicants were asked about their backgrounds, why they wanted to go to Mississippi, and their experiences with voter registration. They were
told to provide a list of people organizers should contact if they were arrested. There were essays, references, and, for some, interviews. Applying was not a casual undertaking.

McAdam’s initial hypothesis was that students who ended up going to Mississippi probably had different motivations from those who stayed home, which explained the divergence in participation. To test this idea, he divided applicants into two groups. The first pile were people who said they wanted to go to Mississippi for “self-interested” motives, such as to “test myself,” to “be where the action is,” or to “learn about the southern way of life.” The second group were those with “other-oriented” motives, such as to “improve the lot of blacks,” to “aid in the full realization of democracy,” or to “demonstrate the power of nonviolence as a vehicle for social change.”

The self-centered, McAdam hypothesized, would be more likely to stay home once they realized the risks of Freedom Summer. The other-oriented would be more likely to get on the bus.

The hypothesis was wrong.

The selfish and the selfless, according to the data, went South in equal numbers. Differences in motives did not explain “any significant distinctions between participants and withdrawals,” McAdam wrote.

Next, McAdam compared applicants’ opportunity costs. Maybe those who stayed home had husbands or girlfriends keeping them from going to Mississippi? Maybe they had gotten jobs, and couldn’t swing a two-month unpaid break?

Wrong again.

“Being married or holding a full-time job actually enhanced the applicant’s chances of going south,” McAdam concluded.

He had one hypothesis left. Each applicant was asked to list their memberships in student and political organizations and at least ten people they wanted kept informed of their summer activities, so McAdam took these lists and used them to chart each applicant’s
social network. By comparing memberships in clubs, he was able to determine which applicants had friends who also applied for Freedom Summer.

Once he finished, he finally had an answer as to why some students went to Mississippi, and others stayed home: because of social habits—or more specifically, because of the power of strong and weak ties working in tandem. The students who participated in Freedom Summer were enmeshed in the types of communities where both their close friends
and
their casual acquaintances expected them to get on the bus. Those who withdrew were also enmeshed in communities, but of a different kind—the kind where the social pressures and habits didn’t compel them to go to Mississippi.

“Imagine you’re one of the students who applied,” McAdam told me. “On the day you signed up for Freedom Summer, you filled out the application with five of your closest friends and you were all feeling really motivated.

“Now, it’s six months later and departure day is almost here. All the magazines are predicting violence in Mississippi. You called your parents, and they told you to stay at home. It would be strange, at that point, if you weren’t having second thoughts.

“Then, you’re walking across campus and you see a bunch of people from your church group, and they say, ‘We’re coordinating rides—when should we pick you up?’ These people aren’t your closest friends, but you see them at club meetings and in the dorm, and they’re important within your social community. They all know you’ve been accepted to Freedom Summer, and that you’ve said you want to go. Good luck pulling out at that point. You’d lose a huge amount of social standing. Even if you’re having second thoughts, there’s real consequences if you withdraw. You’ll lose the respect of people whose opinions matter to you.”

When McAdam looked at applicants with religious orientations—students who cited a “Christian duty to help those in need” as their
motivation for applying, for instance, he found mixed levels of participation. However, among those applicants who mentioned a religious orientation
and
belonged to a religious organization, McAdam found that
every single one
made the trip to Mississippi. Once their communities knew they had been accepted into Freedom Summer, it was
impossible for them to withdraw.
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On the other hand, consider the social networks of applicants who were accepted into the program but didn’t go to Mississippi. They, too, were involved in campus organizations. They, too, belonged to clubs and cared about their standing within those communities. But the organizations they belonged to—the newspaper and student government, academic groups and fraternities—had different expectations. Within those communities, someone could withdraw from Freedom Summer and suffer little or no decline in the prevailing social hierarchy.

When faced with the prospect of getting arrested (or worse) in Mississippi, most students probably had second thoughts. However, some were embedded in communities where social habits—the expectations of their friends and the peer pressure of their acquaintances—compelled participation, so regardless of their hesitations, they bought a bus ticket. Others—who also cared about civil rights—belonged to communities where the social habits pointed in a slightly different direction, so they thought to themselves,
Maybe I’ll just stay home.

On the morning after he bailed Rosa Parks out of jail, E. D. Nixon placed a call to the new minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, Jr. It was a little after 5
A.M.
, but Nixon didn’t say hello or ask if he had awoken King’s two-week-old daughter when the minister answered—he just launched into an account of Parks’s arrest, how she had been hauled into jail for refusing to
give up her seat, and their plans to fight her case in court and boycott the city’s buses on Monday. At the time, King was twenty-six years old. He had been in Montgomery for only a year and was still trying to figure out his role within the community. Nixon was asking for King’s endorsement as well as permission to use his church for a boycott meeting that night. King was wary of getting too deeply involved. “Brother Nixon,” he said, “let me think about it and you call me back.”

But Nixon didn’t stop there. He reached out to one of King’s closest friends—one of the strongest of King’s strong ties—named Ralph D. Abernathy, and asked him to help convince the young minister to participate. A few hours later, Nixon called King again.

“I’ll go along with it,” King told him.

“I’m glad to hear you say so,” Nixon said, “because I’ve talked to eighteen other people and told them to meet in your church tonight. It would have been kind of bad to be
getting together there without you.”
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Soon, King was drafted into serving as president of the organization that had sprung up to coordinate the boycott.

On Sunday, three days after Parks’s arrest, the city’s black ministers—after speaking to King and other members of the new organization—explained to their congregations that every black church in the city had agreed to a one-day protest. The message was clear: It would be embarrassing for any parishioner to sit on the sidelines. That same day, the town’s newspaper, the
Advertiser,
contained an article about “a ‘top secret’ meeting of Montgomery Negroes who plan a
boycott of city buses Monday.”
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The reporter had gotten copies of flyers that white women had taken from their maids. The black parts of the city were “flooded with thousands of copies” of the leaflets, the article explained, and it was anticipated that every black citizen would participate. When the article was written, only Parks’s friends, the ministers, and the boycott organizers had publicly committed to the protest—but once the city’s black
residents read the newspaper, they assumed, like white readers, that everyone else was already on board.

Many people sitting in the pews and reading the newspapers knew Rosa Parks personally and were willing to boycott because of their friendships with her. Others didn’t know Parks, but they could sense the community was rallying behind her cause, and that if they were seen riding a bus on Monday, it would look bad. “If you work,” read a flyer handed out in churches, “take a cab, or share a ride, or walk.” Then everyone heard that the boycott’s leaders had convinced—or strong-armed—all the black taxi drivers into agreeing to carry black passengers on Monday for ten cents a ride, the same as a bus fare. The community’s weak ties were drawing everyone together. At that point, you were either with the boycott or against it.

On the Monday morning of the boycott, King woke before dawn and got his coffee. His wife, Coretta, sat at the front window and waited for the first bus to pass. She shouted when she saw the headlights of the South Jackson line, normally filled with maids on their way to work, roll by with no passengers. The next bus was empty as well. And the one that came after. King got into his car and started driving around, checking other routes. In an hour, he counted eight black passengers. One week earlier, he would have seen hundreds.