Think about when you showed up for your first day of graduate school. Maybe you weren’t exactly sure what to expect. What did you do first?
Without even thinking about it, you looked around.
You do it at conferences. It happens at meetings.
Our brains are wired to look for cues on how to behave normally. That’s why we have conformity bias.
Humans prefer to see how to behave than to be told how to behave. The same is true when leading a group.