Following Crowds
Studies show that people are very inclined to join the crowd. When a few ringers looked up in the sky for 60 seconds, a bunch of people surrounding them eventually joined in to look up as well. The amount of ringers looking up varied from a few to several people. The study showed that the more people looking up initially, the more inclined people were to follow. Eventually, hundreds of people were following. This created an information cascade, where even though the people may have been looking up for no reason, others still looked up abandoning their own (lack of) information to follow the crowd. The cascade was able to happen very easily based on little genuine information that there was anything to look at. Another study showed that people are able to naturally detect where people are looking, even only given a brief time to determine where they were looking showing that it is instinctual to follow others.
In an additional study, people were given the task of mentally rotating a 3-D figure to compare and determine whether it was same or different. First people wrote down their individual answers. Then, the group was told to follow the lead of Jocelyn, who happened to be in on the study and had the answers. However, they did not tell Tony, one guy in the group, to follow her. He had gotten the majority of the answers correct (90%) when he initially wrote down his answers. When he followed the group, his percentage correct significantly dropped to 10%.
These studies show that other people greatly influence people in their choices they make. Another explanation for this behavior is that people imitate what other people are doing based on direct-benefit effects and information-based effects. With direct-benefit reasons, the actions of others affect one’s payoffs rather than indirectly changing one’s information. In both these experiments, information-based reasons are guiding their decisions. The people that join the ringers think the crowd might know something is up in the sky that they did not know about. Tony thinks that since the group all agrees on the other answer, he must be missing something even though he was certain when he wrote down his answers. He is making his decision based on what other people are doing rather than what he knows.
Sources:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/humans-naturally-follow-crowd-behavior-1410543908
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/Health/story?id=1495038