The writer is chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna
Doing as others do can save your life. In 2015, gunmen from the al-Shabaab militant group stormed a college in Kenya. They took students hostage, showing mercy only to those who could prove they were Muslims by reciting a key tract from the Koran. Those who could not were shot.
One Christian student watched what was happening to her fellow students and quickly memorised the tract. As Michelle Baddeley argues in Copycats and Contrarians, the girl “saved her own life through social learning, by gathering information about others’ choices and their consequences”.