Dana scrolled Facebook every night, the way most of us do now, half paying attention, thumb moving before her mind caught up. She believed most of what she saw. Not because she was careless. Because everyone in her feed was sharing the same posts, the same outrage, the same certainty. When a hundred people you trust act like something is true, it starts to feel true whether you've checked it or not.
Then one night her old college roommate sent her a single line: "Did you check if this is even true?"
Dana told me later that the question landed like a hand on her shoulder. Not an accusation. Just a pause. And in that pause, something she'd been carrying without examining finally had room to breathe.
Psychologists have a name for what was happening to Dana before that text arrived. They call it social proof, sometimes bandwagon effect. It's the tendency to treat a claim as more credible the more people around us seem to believe it. Robert Cialdini, who spent decades studying influence, found that we use "what others are doing" as a shortcut for "what is true," especially when we're uncertain or overwhelmed. It's not a flaw in Dana. It's a feature of how human brains have always worked in groups. For most of history, if everyone in your village ran from something, running was the smart move. You didn't have time to check first.
But we're not living in villages anymore. We're living inside algorithms built to maximize engagement, not accuracy. What spreads fastest isn't what's most true. It's what's most shareable. So the same instinct that once kept us safe now makes us easy to move, one share at a time, by people who understand the mechanism even if we don't.
I spent years as a counselor and coach, and later watching this exact pattern play out in political life. I watched intelligent, caring people drift, not in one dramatic leap, but in a hundred small moments of "everyone I trust believes this, so it must be true." That's the drift I write about in Reversing the Drift. It rarely announces itself. It just accumulates.
Here is what I want you to take from Dana's story. You don't need to distrust everyone around you. You need one honest question you're willing to ask yourself before you share, before you repeat, before you let a crowd's confidence stand in for your own checking: "Did I actually check if this is true, or did I just notice that everyone else seemed sure?"
That's the whole practice. It's not dramatic. It's not exhausting. It's just a pause, the same pause Dana's roommate gave her.
If this resonates, Reversing the Drift walks through exactly how good people drift this way, and how to find their way back to themselves. The first chapter is free.
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