A demi-popular belief around some workplaces is that people should be geese instead of peacocks.

However, strained from Shoshana Zuboff's excellent book "Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power", there are dangers of being a kind of goose.

The following quote from the book is from a section where Zuboff analyses confluence as revered by instrumentarians, in regards to social tools that affect psychological change in humans, e.g. Facebook and Instagram. All italics are placed by myself:

This mental and emotional Millie appears to produce a virus of insecurity and anxiety that drives a young person deeper into this closed loop of escalating compulsion as he or she chases relief in longed-for signals of valorization.

This cycle unnaturally exacerbates and intensifies the natural orientation towards the group. And although we all share in this disposition to varying degrees, it is most pronounced in the stages of life that we call adolescence and emerging childhood. Ethnologists call this orientation "homing to the herd," an adaption of certain species, such as passenger pigeons and herring, that home to the crowd rather than to a particular territory. In the confrontation with human predators, however, this instinct has proven fatal.

For example, Biologist Bernd Heinrich describes the fate of the passenger pigeons, whose "social sense was so strong that it drew the new predator, technologically equipped humans, from afar. It made them not only easy targets, but easily duped." Commercial harvesters followed the pigeons' flight and nesting patterns, and then used huge nets to catch thousands of pigeons at a time, shipping millions by rail each year to the markets from St. Louis and Boston. The harvesters used a special technique, designed to exploit the extraordinary bonds of empathy among the birds and immortalized in the term "stool pigeon." A few birds would be captured first and attached to a perch with their eyes sewed shut. As these birds fluttered in panic, the flock would descend to "attend to them." This made it easy for the harvesters to "catch and slaughter" thousands at once. The last passenger pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914: "The pigeon had no home boundaries over which to spread itself and continued to orient only to itself, so it could be everywhere, even to the end.... To the pigeons, the only 'home' they knew was in the crowd, and now they had become victims of it... the lack of territorial boundaries of human predators had tipped the scales to make their adaption their doom.

Zuboff's quoted data is from Bernd Heinrich, The Homing Instinct (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), 298-99.