Stop and Stare
Andrew Gallup from Princeton University experimented with how people follow each others’ gazes in a crowd. Five actors in a busy street stopped and looked upwards and a camera followed the gazes of other pedestrians. The study confirmed that people tend to follow each other’s gazes. Because of the modern technology Gallup used, he was able to keep track of everyone’s gazes and where they were walking. He concluded that people were more likely to look if they were walking slowly or if there were more actors looking up. However, his findings don’t match up with a previous study, by Milgram, that said when crowds start looking in the same direction, suddenly everyone looks in the same direction. This is the tipping point. Gallup’s experiment shows that the proportion of people looking up increases up to a certain point, but not to the point where everyone is looking in the same direction.
In class, we’ve looked at diffusion of a behavior through a network. We simulated this by first changing the behavior of one or more nodes and see how the behavior propagates through the network. This experiment is very similar to our model. By having a few people in the network change their behavior so they’re all looking in the same direction, if enough people are doing it, other people will start to look in the same direction. From the figure we can also say that there is a cluster of people that doesn’t reach the threshold of there being enough people looking up for them to bother doing the same thing. In addition, this also relates to information cascades. The informational effect in this situation is that people are following others’ gazes because they think something is going on and that these people know or see something they don’t. So people see the end effect of people deciding to look in a certain direction but they don’t know why they made this decision, so they look too.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/04/23/what-are-you-looking-at-people-follow-each-other%E2%80%99s-gazes-but-without-a-tipping-point/
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