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Lollapalooza, the 25th tendency on Munger’s list, is a kind of “super-tendency”—it involves the confluence of multiple tendencies that reinforce each other and lead to extreme consequences. Other terms for Lollapalooza Tendency might include “synergy” and “emergent effects.”
As we’ll see below, an otherwise normal person can become a cult devotee through a combination of doubt-avoidance, stress influence, liking tendency, and a dozen other biases.
Unlike the 24 other cognitive biases, this isn’t a well-characterized tendency in psychology. Munger argues this is because multiple biases are hard to replicate in the lab, and psychologists simplify their research to yield replicable, isolated studies. Yet it seems like common sense that different biases could reinforce each other and be acting in the same situation simultaneously. This is yet another example of how contrarian thinking can be more correct than what an entire body of research has suggested.
Munger argues that anytime you see extreme behaviors on an individual or social level, lollapaloozas might be at work. This can include cults, the Milgram experiment (both of which we’ll explore further), the rise of Hitler, and stock market booms and busts.
Munger doesn’t suggest an antidote to lollapaloozas, but one approach might be to identify the tendencies at work, rank-order them by strength of influence, then tackle each tendency individually to weaken the mutual reinforcement of the tendencies.
In discussing lollapaloozas, Munger repeatedly mentions two examples of extreme behaviors: how cults work, and the Milgram shocking experiment. Following the spirit of his thinking, we’ll walk one by one through the checklist of 25 cognitive biases to see which ones contribute to these behaviors.
Let’s walk through how an ordinary person becomes drawn to a cult and over time becomes an unrecognizable cult devotee. Nearly all of Munger’s 25 biases contribute: