Threshold of action for individuals

Well, I am starting by assuming that all of us have come across at-least one of the below stated situations in our life, where we have to take a decision out of binary choice.

•   You are sitting impatiently in a boring classroom, wanting to leave but waiting for few number of people to leave the hall.
• Want to taste liquor for the first time, but your inner you barricades you by generating guilt feeling about it. Yet you want to try.
•    You are in a momentum to propose a girl, but you are wary about the consequences if she accept and if she doesn’t.

      In all above cases your decision is sometimes dependent and influenced by combination of factors. In other words to put simply, individuals have their own threshold level to do any of above things. 

      Mark Granovetter, an American sociologist and professor at Stanford, explains threshold as a point where benefits exceed the perceived costs, in his journal “Threshold models of collective behavior ”. The paper takes riot as an example to elaborate his models of collective behaviors. Let’s say in a company there are 100 people, and there is an anticipatory strike. And the threshold of participation for each employee is 0, 1 so on till 99. If a guy with 0 threshold instigates the strike, then there is a success in the strike. If there is an employee with threshold 3 is missing, then there is a possibility that strike will be a failure. Though I have half read his model, I would insist the dilettantes to read through this article. It talks about how individual thresholds matters for a fraternity.

      And did you know that, by vaguely knowing your threshold you can be exploited or misused or misled by others. Below is the “Asch conformity Experiment” you should watch.

  

     You can relate this experiment with the 2^nd point stated above in the first paragraph. You know drinking is injuries to health, but still you drink because all others are drinking it and you don’t want to be left on the sidelines.

     Many commercial ads exaggerate the count of people using their product and creates a trend. And this is called Bandwagon Effect.

    

   

    And this is how we look for guys who create trends. Seeing all this one wouldn't vacillate in the instances like choosing between soap and face-wash or  think whether to buy a power bank or simply another battery for their cell phone.