Allegiance is the prime driver in all human decision making. While a computer may use data, even scientists decisions are primarily driven by allegiance. Understanding allegiance is critical to understanding how to work or even live in a group or get traction with a new idea.

When someone is speaking or writing, a significant amount of the listener or readers attention is allocated to deciding if they like the speaker, or more specifically, wish to ally their views with them. Often, the data the speaker is transferring, in the belief that data convinces or converts the listener, is simply not processed.

What is actually going on millisecond by millisecond is an assessment of the speaker himself. Specifically, is he handsome; is he confident and speaking with ease; is he funny and smiles; is he well connected or a leader; do I like the way he is dressed; is he a friend of, or admired, by friends or mentors of mine, or the rest of the audience. This web of associations is the basis on which a human decides to take on concepts presented by a speaker.

In 1971, Albert Mehrabian concluded that customers base the decision to buy from a salesman, 55% on body language, 38% on the tone and music of their voice, and only 7% on their assessment of the salesperson’s actual words. Likewise, as Andrew Brown observed, the way we are most easily convinced is a bit like baiting a hook to catch a fish. It’s most effective when the bait is not a detailed model of a small fish but an almost two-dimensional abstract that wiggles with exaggerated clumsiness. You allow the fish to see what it wants to see, what it wants and expects, and he does the rest.

While this assessment reaffirms the lack of interest in data it does not explore the powerful force of allegiance inherent in the assessments of the salesperson’s body and voice.

During Elizabeth I reign, the queen had a sweet tooth and developed chronic tooth decay, leaving her teeth blackened. The queen also had a receding hairline. Women of the period used to shave the front of their scalps and blacken their teeth to mimic the queen.

Pop idols, the queens of teenagers, in the age of moving pictures, not only dictate the clothes their fans wear, but their gestures and mannerisms. Product placement has evolved around this phenomenon. Jimmy Iovine saw his recording company’s revenues decimated by online streaming in 2000-2007 so he started putting in his recording artist’s contracts the obligation to include various products in their videos and at concerts. The headphones he obliged his artists to wear were a brand he owned called Beat. He sold the Beat brand to Apple for ten times the value of his record label, such was the success of his product placement model. At the core of Steve Job’s business model was the creation of a loyal tribe of users. When asked why they so love their slower, more expensive Apple products, there is almost no data involved in the answer, it is an emotive allegiance.

Before companies, politicians were the first to notice allegiance’s place above substance. They focused on being liked; on associating themselves with the community leaders of each audience, either in the local church or cultural icons; they learnt about the rythmns of speech; to smile and to dress in the clothes of the audience. For our dress is one of the strongest ways of confirming allegiance to a particular tribe. Whether it’s punks or Accountants, they dress to confirm their allegiances. Some people look back at photos of themselves in the 80’s incredulous that they wore such monstrosities. It is more interesting to explore how far we are will to go to ‘fit in’.

Fitting in is a primal driver. Embarassement is the emotion we feel when our actions or words threaten our position in our community.

As mentioned, in science, allegiance remains equally strong. Scientists that question the paradigm of the tribe are ridiculed and ignored. Most innovators, when describing their journey confirm that the invention or theory was not hard, what was hard was the years of politicking for the concept or machine to be accepted by the scientific community. My grandfather took 10 years to convince someone that a jet engine was not impossible, the concept and prototyping took a fraction of this time.

A recent video of a challenge between a mixed martial artist and a Grand Master reaffirmed the overriding power of allegiance. The Grand Master was able to throw his students to the floor without even touching them. Soon, not only did his students believe he was undefeatable, the Grand Master began believing it himself. He put out a US$5000 challenge for anyone to try and defeat him. A fighter accepted the challenge, and with the first punch, bloodied the Grand Master’s nose, with the second he hospitalised him. The gasps of surprise from the students, which no doubt, were rapidly followed by declaring him a fraud, mask the much more interesting topic of allegiance, the handing over of one’s will, morale compass, and vision of the world, to a person or group.

The most dramatic manifestations of this are when a small community participates in a lynching, or a larger community in a genocide. Neighbours that have lived side by side as friends suddenly turn on a family and stone them to death. Many victims seem less upset about the horrors than the fact that the perpetrators were old friends. The horror of realising the darkest acts could be so easily spawned so close to home shatters their world. Rape, murder, and looting by foreigners can be framed within their paradigm, but not when they occur within their community.

The community that has committed the atrocity avoids looking at the mechanics of allegiance necessary for such large scale delusion, and instead, chooses to demonise their deceased leaders. If we would explored these examples of allegiance gone awry in detail, rather than rewrite history to absolve the majority, we would then be able to track this process into the very fabric of every community. But the community itself is a ‘being’ or creature, and like any creature, its instincts of self-preservation are strong. Alas the community will ensure this fabric of allegiance remains unexplored.

So, as a geek in love with data, I must constantly remind myself, as my audiences’ eyes begin to glaze, to focus 93% of my energy on being liked and just 7% on the data or concepts I wish to share.