Japanese Comedy and Information Cascades
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGW-cfP3CqE&t=224s
https://simplicable.com/new/information-cascade
In the youtube video linked above, it shows a prank video that a Japanese comedy show performed. In the video, it shows random people walking down a street when all of a sudden a herd of people seemly very scared turn the corner and start running towards them. Immediately, the individuals start running along with the pack of people, not knowing what the pack of people was actually running from.
While the makers of this video intended for it to just be a funny prank, it provides way more than just comic relief. This video provides insight into information cascades and the effects they have on people’s decision making. Even though the subjects in the video had no idea what the others were running away from, or if that thing was even a threat, they ran anyway. Proving that most of the time the decisions of the majority outweigh the thought of the individual. If everyone around you is doing one thing, and you are doing the opposite, most likely you will convert to do what everyone else is doing.
I would be very interested to see this experiment done in another way. As we learned in class, if just one person is doing something different, then depending on the threshold of other people, that action will most likely not spread. Therefore, if this experiment instead were to start with just one person running away in fear and slowly add one more person each time, it would be interesting to see what number of people seemly running away in fear would cause individual subjects to follow them blindly.