Information cascade in the Japanese comedy prank crowd running
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGW-cfP3CqE
There are several Japanese comedy pranks that were examples of the concept of information cascade that we learned in class. The idea of information cascade is when an individual makes a decision based on their observations of the previous participants, instead of on their own signal. This may lead to wrong judgement, or a lack of judgement altogether. In this Japanese comedy prank, there is one person who walks on a quiet and narrow street. But suddenly, there appears on the street a large group of people running very hard, appearing to be running away from something. This person in the experiment, interestingly, would always choose to run with the group, despite there is no reason from his own judgement that he should be running.
The street is quiet. He is in a good mood and good state. He has no reason to think he needs to run fast to be away from anything. However, the large crowd’s speed may indicate they have reasons to be running away, and it is statistically safer to run away with them, since the probability of them being correct is much bigger. Therefore, this person would choose to run, and continues to add to the denominator of the probability model. And this forms the information cascade.
