Benefits to Following the Crowd
Suppose a trend like the fidget spinner or dabbing ends up on your front page of Recommended YouTube Videos. You ask yourself whether you approve of and adopt these trends. Even if you decide at first to not engage in such trends or you are at the tipping point, you would be more willing to accept these trends into your livelihood if you see your friends committed to them. The notion that “if other people do it, that means it’s right” applies to these scenarios where you ask yourself whether to commit yourself to doing an action or not. A shortcut to deciding how to act is a social proof. Consider an experiment done by Robert Cialdini. He has used the concept of a social proof to prevent environmental theft. Within Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, there was a sign that reads “Your heritage is being vandalized every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a small piece at a time.” After having removed the sign from a specific path, he found that this path had one-third less theft than that of paths with signs. He reasoned that visitors interpreted the sign as a means of permission and “normal” to “take” small pieces of wood. Within a study conducted by researchers, they have tried to utilize the principle of social proof to help people surmount their fears. Albert Bandura and his colleagues worked alongside with a group of young children traumatically afraid of dogs. “The children watched a four-year-old boy happily play with a dog for twenty minutes a day for four days. After the four day period, 67 percent of the children who watched the boy play with the dog were willing to enter a playpen with a dog.” As a result, the researchers have hypothesized that these children utilized the behavior of the boy playing with a dog as a role model to change their own behavior.
This article presents a more explanatory form of Information Cascade. In class, we’ve reviewed how trends can be viewed as High Signals as people approvingly respond to it and adopt these trends into their lifestyles. Though we have not directly related High Signals to life-changing scenarios, it can be used to provide reasonable hypothesis to the study conducted by the researchers on the traumatized children. If they see a happy child gleefully playing with a dog, they will approvingly respond and emulate their behaviors to achieve the same effect. In regards to the experiment conducted by Robert, whenever the sign was there, people were notified that others would do it as well, seemingly “permitting” people to take wood. This effect can be used to describe in terms of Information Cascade as you’ve been told that others have done it as well, so there would be little, if any, harm done to you. However, when the sign was taken off, less theft was committed, telling us that without this information, people would be left to their own devices and assume what is best for themselves and the environment.