Escaping the Herd in Online Social Networks
This article is about the underlying assumption that many social media advertisers have about online social interactions: that information cascades reign supreme in the ways that people interact on social media platforms. However, according to Sun, Zhang and Zhu’s study on the social networks, they believe that there are confounding factors that disprove this. To carry out their study, they ran a large-scale field experiment using data from the Chinese social media site, Kaixin. The study asks users to choose a wall color, presenting them with a randomly generated list of the most popular colors. They indeed found that subjects are more likely to diverge from the popular colors that they are presented with.
This article relates to our studies on information cascades. As discussed in class, information cascades arise when it is optimal for an individual, having observed the actions of those ahead of him and her, to follow the behavior of the preceding individual without regard to his or her own information. This study takes the viewpoint that information cascades, at least in this instance, are less important than being different or separating yourself from the countless other accounts. This in sort of a cascade acting in the opposite way; when a user knows what is popular, they tend to choose the unpopular choice.
Article Source: Escaping the Herd: Evidence on the Need to Be Different in Social Networks from a Large Field Experiment, http://people.bu.edu/monic/ToBelongOrDifferent-0812.pdf