The power of “like”
https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/power
This article talks about how behavior regarding social media posts is affected by a post’s current popularity. The study found that teens were more likely to like a post if it had more likes to begin with. Viewing posts with lots of likes also activates the reward system in the brain, as well as lowering the viewer’s self-control. Because of this teens were changing their behavior in response to the number of likes on a post in order to get social approval. The teens also tended to experience the most activity in their brains’ reward pathways when they viewed their own photos with many likes. Given my own personal experience, I have seen this to be true. I know people who are afraid to like a post if it has not received a lot of likes. The desire to fit in and be one with the crowd is part of human nature.
The rich-get-richer effect is apparent here. The teenagers tended to like pictures with more likes, continuing the stream of likes and attention to those posts. This effect, further explained by information cascades, can result in teens viewing certain posts in a higher regard based on the previous number of likes, and they then continue this trend by adding their own likes. This has effects beyond the social media platforms as, for example, when teens see pictures of friends consuming alcohol, it normalizes and encourages the behavior. New changes that have been made to social media sites that boost content if it has a higher number of likes only exacerbate this problem, and make it even easier for the already popular posts to become more popular. Information cascades come into play if you consider a post to be “good” if it has a lot of likes, if other people in the past have deemed it to be “good” by announcing their like, then others are more likely to continue this trend, despite their own actual opinions about the post. In many cases, viewers potentially like a post solely because it already has lots of likes, and they want to be a part of the crowd.