It is a Sunday evening on one of Bengaluru's famous food streets, and the lane is packed.
Ravi and his wife Meenakshi have come from Madurai for the weekend, their first visit in years. They know no one here. They do not know which stall is the famous one, or which is merely loud.
Two pani puri stalls stand side by side, barely five steps apart. The steel bowls look the same, the stacks of puris look the same, and so do the pots of tamarind water.
The first stall has a queue of about twenty-five people, spilling on to the footpath. The second has four or five customers, and a vendor chatting easily as he fills their plates. It is not empty. It is simply quiet.
Ravi does not deliberate, and neither does Meenakshi. They walk to the longer queue and wait fifteen minutes. Six puris cost about forty rupees, and the verdict is good. Perfectly good. Not remarkable.
On the walk back, Meenakshi asks, half joking, "Was it really better than the other one?"
Ravi laughs. "No idea. But there were twenty-five people there."
He has never tasted the other stall's pani puri. He probably never will.
Ravi is a civil engineer, and a careful one. When a supplier tells him a batch of steel meets the required strength, he asks for the test certificate. He has sent samples back to the lab because the paperwork looked too tidy.
Yet on that street, he asked for no certificate at all. He simply trusted the queue.
Ravi is a composite of many of us. Most of us have stood in that queue.
A Sensible Instinct
Before we call this a mistake, let us be fair to Ravi. It was a sensible thing to do.
A queue is information. Twenty-five people had already made a choice, and each had put fifteen minutes behind it. In a city where Ravi knew nobody, the queue was a local's opinion he could borrow. Psychologists call this social proof, a term Robert Cialdini made popular. When we are unsure, we look at what others are doing and treat it as evidence.
On that street, the instinct worked well for three quiet reasons.
Ravi could see the crowd: the faces, the plates, the speed of the line. He could check for himself, because one plate would tell him everything. And the cost of being wrong was forty rupees.
Keep these three conditions in mind. They are about to disappear.
Now Take the Stall Away
Change the street into a phone screen.
It is a Sunday morning back in Madurai, and Ravi's phone shows 63 unread messages in the family WhatsApp group. Someone has shared a screenshot with a green arrow and a number beside it, called the "premium". Below it is one line: Strong response. Last date is Wednesday. Apply today.
A cousin writes that he has already applied for his wife and parents. An uncle replies with a thumbs up. The messages keep coming.
Ravi had not planned to invest anything that week. He had ₹15,000 set aside for a laptop for his daughter. By evening, that money was sitting in an application form.
Now look at the three conditions again.
He could not see the crowd. He saw a screenshot and a member count.
He could not easily check for himself. The number came from a place he could not visit.
And the cost of being wrong was no longer forty rupees. It was a daughter's laptop.
There was one more thing in common with that Bengaluru street. Ravi was a stranger there, and he is a stranger here too. He knows steel, not premiums. And strangers borrow opinions.
Every condition that made the instinct safe on the street was gone. The instinct did not notice.
The Number That Lives Only in Conversation
Before an IPO lists on the exchange, an unofficial market can develop around it. The price at which people informally agree to buy or sell is often discussed through a number called the grey market premium, or GMP. It is not an exchange-traded price, and it is not an official price published by the stock exchange.
It is a fascinating number because it has no address. No exchange publishes it, and no one is accountable for it. Yet it travels fast, through groups, headlines and videos.
There is also a quiet loop in it. A high number makes people talk. People talking makes the number feel true.
Whether such a number turns out to be a good guide or a poor one on any given day is not the question here. The question is what we do with a number we cannot examine, when it arrives wrapped in the excitement of people we cannot see.
Who Was "Everyone"? An Echo Is Not a Chorus
Weeks later, a friend asked Ravi why he had applied.
"Everyone was applying," he said.
His friend asked, "Who is everyone?"
Ravi went back and counted. These numbers are illustrative, but the shape will feel familiar. The group had 40 members. Eleven had written anything at all. Three had said something about the business itself. Nobody had posted a single page from the offer document.
What had felt like forty people was, on inspection, three opinions and a great deal of nodding.
Economists have a name for how this happens: an information cascade. Imagine ten people choosing between two options. The first has a private hunch and chooses. The second, unsure, sees the first choice and follows. By the third, the pattern is visible, and following seems wiser than trusting a private hunch. By the tenth, nine choices point the same way, and it looks like nine independent confirmations.
In truth it may be one hunch and eight echoes.
A chorus is many people singing from their own throats. An echo is one voice bouncing off walls. From inside a group chat, they sound almost identical.
|
What Ravi saw |
What may have been happening |
|
A group of forty members |
Eleven who spoke, and twenty-nine who watched |
|
Most messages in agreement |
A few opinions, repeated and forwarded |
|
A premium quoted with confidence |
An unofficial number nobody was accountable for |
|
"Everyone is applying" |
Everyone who was talking was applying. Those who decided against it
had no reason to post |
That last row deserves a second look. The people who quietly decide not to join in leave no trace. The crowd we see is only the crowd that chose to speak.
Why the Same Instinct Fires Everywhere
So why did Ravi's mind treat a screenshot like a queue?
Because the rule it follows is old and fast: many people, so probably safe. It was built for streets, not screens. It does not ask, "Many people where?" It fires on anything that looks like a crowd: a count, a number, a forward.
And it fires hardest when we feel like strangers. In an unfamiliar city, Ravi leaned on the queue. In an unfamiliar market, most of us lean on the crowd, for the same reason.
A second pull joins it. FOMO, the fear of missing out, is less about information and more about belonging and regret. Nobody wants to be the only person in the family who did not apply.
Social proof tells us that the crowd may know something. An information cascade makes us assume that the crowd knows something. FOMO makes us afraid of being the one person who ignored it.
The strength of this pull was demonstrated in the 1950s by the psychologist Solomon Asch. Imagine sitting in a room with seven other people. The experimenter shows you a card with one line and another card with three lines, and asks a very simple question: which of the three lines is the same length as the first? The answer is obvious. You can see it. The first few people give the right answer. Then, suddenly, everyone before you gives the same wrong answer. You know they are wrong. You can see that they are wrong. But now it is your turn. Do you trust your eyes, or do you trust seven people who all seem to agree? That was the question Asch was really studying. In his experiments, people went along with the clearly wrong majority in around a third of the critical responses, and roughly three-quarters of the participants went along with the group at least once. About a quarter never did. What makes the experiment even more interesting is that some participants later said they had actually suspected that the group was wrong. They simply found it difficult to be the only person giving a different answer. And then Asch changed one small thing. He introduced just one person who disagreed with the majority. That single voice made it much easier for others to resist the group. One person did not necessarily have a better answer. He simply made it easier for everyone else to trust what they could already see.
Now look at the family group again. Someone in it may well have had doubts. But a doubt costs something to say aloud, while a thumbs up costs nothing. So the group looks unanimous, when it is often just the sound of doubt staying quiet.
That is why the queue we never see follows us everywhere. It appears as a sector that everyone at a wedding is discussing, a plot of land near a new road that everyone "knows" will double, a reel with lakhs of views, a list titled "most bought this week". The costumes change. The play is the same.
There is also a quieter cost. A decision we make because the crowd made it is a decision the crowd can unmake. When the same group turns nervous, we may find we have no reason of our own to hold on to. We follow them out, just as we followed them in.
Three Questions Worth Asking of Any Crowd
These are not rules. They are only questions, and they take a few seconds.
Who, exactly, is the crowd? Can I name ten real people, or do I only have a number?
What do they know that I can check for myself?
If the group had stayed silent this week, would I still be making this choice?
Ravi now sometimes types a small question into the group: "Where is this from?" Asch's participants found that one dissenting voice made it easier for others to stay independent. A question like that is a dissenting voice that is not even disagreeing.
The Honest Caveats
Crowds are not always wrong. When many people form judgments independently, their combined estimate can be remarkably good. The trouble begins when the judgments stop being independent, which is exactly what happens when we all watch each other.
Doing the opposite of the crowd is not the answer either. Someone who does the reverse of whatever everyone else is doing is still letting the crowd decide. Only the sign has changed.
Conversations with family and friends about money have real value. The issue is not listening. It is the weight we give to what we hear.
And this article says nothing about whether any particular offering, price or trend is good or bad. A decision can turn out well for poor reasons and badly for good ones. Outcomes teach us less than we think. Process is the part we can actually examine.
The Money Vichara for Today
Think of the last time you joined a queue you never actually saw.
Who was standing in that queue, and what did they know that you could have checked?
Then ask the harder one. If the group had been silent, would you have made the same decision?
A queue can tell us where people are going. It cannot tell us whether we should go with them.
That is the real vichara.
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