Implication of Information Cascades in Real Life
Consider the following situation: you are driving on the route which you take every day to go home. However, you realize the route is under construction, and you are forced to turn off the road. Based on your own judgment, you want to turn right but all the cars in front of you are turning left. The surprising observation is that most people will follow the front cars and turn left.
This phenomenon is due to the theory known as “Information Cascades” which, by definition, describes the situation that every subsequent actor will disregard his or her own intuition and simply make decisions based on the observations of others before him or her. Information Cascades have been extensively studied and applied in many fields including law and politics. Information Cascades are of great importance to lawyers and politicians. Laws and policies are established to forcefully shape citizens’ behavior to accord with the social norms. Information Cascades also attempt to shape others’ behaviors but in a more suggestive and persuasive manner. Those legislators and leaders who understand Information Cascades may effectively use this technique to manipulate public opinion and behavior without forces. Furthermore, in many cases, Information Cascades facilitate the implementation of effective law and policy.
An example of how Information Cascades shape our behavior in daily life and eventually lead to the social norm is the bottled water phenomenon. In the late 1990s, several popular press that time reports the safety issue related to tap water. Companies that produced bottled waters grabbed the opportunity to extensively advertise the advantage of drinking bottled water. People realize others surrounding them start to take bottled water and they begin to imitate. Within a short period, drinking bottled water developed into a social norm in the United States.
However, Information Cascades can also lead to serious consequences such as public misinformation. A decade-long debate on the harm of vaccines on infants is a result of the misinformation that some research had found vaccines contain toxic content which might cause autism in young kids. Through Information Cascades, few popular press and even some leaders publicly speak against vaccines. Without the knowledge of how vaccines work, many parents drew conclusions from those among the first to speak against vaccines and started to question the safety and reliability of the vaccine schedule proposed by the CDC. Even though scientific research has proved there is no significant relationship between autism and vaccines, this misbelief strengthened by Information Cascades is hard to be eradicated in U.S. society, and thousands of parents still refuse or hesitate to let their children receive vaccines.
Another example shows how Google Search’s PageRank Algorithm will reinforce Information Cascades. Information Cascades may happen to Google Users when they search for some specific terms and directly consume the information without their own judgment. We know that Google Search uses the PageRank Algorithm, and this algorithm reinforces Information Cascade because it is based on the number of sites that point to the target website and the relative popularity of those sites. Some users may exploit this algorithm and spread malicious information by making certain websites appear among the first ones showing in the results. This practice of exploiting Google Search is known as Googlebombing. One example is that several hundred websites conspired to make President George W. Bush’s biography on the U.S. White House Website the first result showing up in a search of the phrase “dirty rotten scoundrel.” There are many more past examples, and Google Algorithm can’t always eliminate inappropriate websites due to the inability to understand nuances in the meanings of some phrases. Through Googlebombing, some users can effectively spread the misinformation or influence others’ opinions and knowledge.
Related Sources: https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1199&context=mjlst