Low Fat Diet Cascade
Recently in class we have gone over the concept of an information cascade, which is where people make decisions based upon the consensus of the crowd rather than what they actually believe. A prime example of an information cascade is of two competing restaurants. If one restaurant is much busier than the other then more people are likely to go to the busier one because everyone else has chosen that restaurant.
The author of the article goes into how cascades form and how they continue to last by talking about the cascade of low- fat diets. He says that the cascade all comes down to what a critical mass of decide in order to start a trend, thus resulting in many people making decisions despite having a lack of knowledge about the issue. This can lead to both correct and incorrect cascades. He says that the problem with cascades is that the choices are binary, that is, to do something or to not do it. In the past there was thought to be a corrective force that sifts out the truth by placing doubt. The example used was with low fat diets where one agency endorses the 100 % low fat diet, but the next person thinks its wrong so they only endorse the 60% low fat diet. The following people would endorse less and less, and the truth eventually shows. In this example people show their true ideas through their actions. Yet, with cascades there are only two choices, endorsing the diet or not. Reducing it down to this simple approach makes it harder for people to gather information to reach a decision, so what happens is that they make the easy choice by following the crowd.
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/how-the-low-fat-low-fact-cascade-just-keeps-rolling-along/?_r=0