Solomon Asch (1951) and Information Cascades
Solomon Asch’s experiment of 1951 aimed to demonstrate people’s innate tendency to conform to a group’s belief, even if they know that group belief to be incorrect. Asch had participants sit in a group and one-by-one select from a group of lines which was most similar in length to a presented line. The answers were quite obvious by design, however the groups the participants were a part of were actually confederates meant to read off the incorrect answer. The participant would be placed last in the line up, so as to increase the social pressure of not conforming with the others answers.
The results were clear; 32% of participants conformed to the wrong answer a majority of the time, and 75% of participants conformed to the incorrect answer at least once. The control group was only incorrect 1% of the time, so this social pressure had a great impact.
This relates to our class discussion of information cascades, as it is the same, if not a very similar, phenomenon. The participants made a direct observation of the lines, and decided (perhaps unconsciously) to go against their own intuition and conform to the earlier determination of the group. Additionally, each participant has private information of how they see the lines (which could vary based on quality of vision) and have a limited action space (choose line A,B, or C). This effect is present everywhere in social networks, from voters selecting similar candidates/political beliefs to their neighbors to a group of friends agreeing to go to a restaurant that really only one friend wanted to go to.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html