I just can’t resist!!
Many people would vehemently deny when told that a large percentage of their decisions are based on observations of what others are doing. Little do we know that it is near impossible to make choices solely based on personal resolve.
A lot of studies have been carried out to prove this hypothesis from way long ago. Friedrich Nietzsche, in On The Genealogy of Morals, talks about how the Herd/ Slave morality spread among the proletariat, who, based on their hatred for the noble class, their masters, all began to develop a sense of insecurity, and therefore, as Nietzsche says, united in their mediocrity. Most people do not question why things are considered morally good or evil, rather uncritically, and largely unconsciously, they adopt the “value judgments of good and evil” dominant within their society. “Nietzsche foresaw this morality as reigning over the Western world for the foreseeable future, and was to him “the danger of dangers” – a morality in which all individuals, even those with the potential to rise above the mediocre mass, are pressured into becoming
“a smaller, almost ridiculous type, a herd animal, something eager to please, sickly, and mediocre.” (Beyond Good and Evil) “. Though totally unrelated to the current view of social networks, this is a great instance of information cascades at play in the past.
Science has been extensively used to prove the influence of other people’s choices in an individual person’s decisions. “The decisions of other people similar to ourselves to take a risk or play it safe influence our own behavior by increasing the subjective value of a particular choice. ” This is more pronounced when the choice at hand is either too risky or more safer, eventhough it is unknown how the choices are incorporated with one’s own preferences in decision-making.
Pearl Chiu and colleagues studied 70 human participants as they made decisions between risky (less probable, but higher payoff) and safe (more probable, but lower payoff) options in a gambling task, either on their own or after observing the choices of others. Participants were more likely to make a choice if they had observed that others had previously made the same choice. This effect was stronger when the choices of others were aligned with a participant’s own risk preferences: risk-averse participants were more likely to be influenced by another’s choice of a safe option, and vice versa. In a separate experiment, the authors found that risk-taking behavior was not affected when participants were told that a computer had randomly generated the choices they observed.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers showed that the increased subjective value of an option due to social influence was reflected in activation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area known to encode the subjective value of choices.”
A closer and more familiar glance is the elections. Everyone wears an “I voted ” sticker, making you feel left out, and therefore pushing you to join in the bandwagon. Why would snapchat lose so much money all because of one user’s dissatisfaction with the platform? It’s all a matter of information cascades.
An interesting video by Prudential shows how imitation and the social force of conformity grows stronger.