How social indicators influence our choices
Just a few weeks ago I was wondering, “What’s Duncan Watts up to these days?” Duncan wrote a terrific book called Six Degrees and re-investigated Stanley Milgram’s famous six degrees of separation phenomena using a web-based experiment. Well, it seems like Duncan is at the Sante Fe Institute, the bastion of mathematical complexity research.
Watts has resurfaced (on my radar anyway) and written a paper with Matthew Salganik and Peter Dodds reporting on a recent experiment to test the effect of social influence on cultural markets. Their ingenious experiment involved building a mini-itunes where people could only download 48 songs. Some of the 14,000+ participants could rate the tune (5 star system) and see the ratings of others. A second group were denied any indicators of others selections.
Here are the key points as I understood them:
- social indicators have an enormous influence on the outcome
- social indicators make the result far more unpredictable
- the rich get richer and the poor get poorer—popular songs become very popular and vice versa
- a good quality song never ends up on the bottom of the pile but impossible to predict whether it will be at the top and by how much
Here is a quote:
We conjecture, therefore, that experts fail to predict success not because they are incompetent judges or misinformed about the preferences of others, but because when individual decisions are subject to social influence, markets do not simply aggregate pre-existing individual preferences. In such a world, there are inherent limits on the predictability of outcomes, irrespective of how much skill or information one has.
It’s a scientific paper so a little heavy going but it’s short and definitely worth a read if you are interested in how networks operate, how crowds respond and wish to further your understanding of complex systems.
[via Decision Science News]
Shawn, author of Putting Stories to Work, is one of the world's leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft & Danone. Connect with Shawn on:
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Social indicators influence decision making shouldn’t really come as a surprise. I remember a particular psychology research paper regarding perception. Two lines of unequal length are drawn side by side. The difference was visually noticeable but not bleedingly obvious. When respondents were asked which of the two lines was longer, if they had been told previously that the majority of people who’d done the test reported A, then they would mostly also choose A, even if they had originally thought that B was correct (and it was correct). Interestingly, in the book “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell, there are a number of interesting research examples showing how easily influenced our individual judgements can be.