Information Cascades and Starting a Movement
This TED talk discusses the idea of the first follower being more important than the leader in starting a movement. The speaker, Derek Sivers, relates this to a clip of a shirtless dancing man, dancing alone while a crowd watches. After about 30 seconds of dancing alone, the man is joined by someone else. After a few seconds, 2 more people join, and within about a minute, the entire crowd that was ridiculing the shirtless dancing man is now dancing together. Sivers discusses how it takes one follower, with a lot of guts, to “turn a lone nut into a leader.” He claims that it takes more guts to be that follower, since you are paralleled in nuttiness as the lone nut, but will not receive credit as the one that started the movement.
This is a more qualitative approach to information cascades, and adapted to a purely social situation. Information cascades occur essentially when people are willing to overlook their own decision, based on the prior decisions of others. This is directly observable in this TED talk, as the crowd that originally laughs at the shirtless dancing man makes that clear as their initial decision. However, once multiple people join in, they clearly overlook their initial decision, join the information cascade, and participate in the act that they independently were very unwilling to do. This change in decision is a direct result of the first follower, as he is the tipping point that causes everyone else after him to question their own decision and weight the fact that there are now two dancing people. In our theoretical, quantitative approach to information cascades discussed in class, this relates to the point where the difference between number of acceptances and rejections reaches 2. The TED talk scenario is slightly different, as there are 2 acceptances and many more rejections, but this highlights the differences that can inherently arise when comparing theory to reality, especially when the situation is more social and involved.