Information Cascades and Personal Reputation
The article “The Role of Information Cascades in Driving Public Opinion” by Sofia Roma touches on information cascades and how they can be important to personal reputations. Roma starts off by giving a brief explanation of how an information cascade is an explanation for why people might just follow the majority and how it isn’t the only explanation. Roma explains that during an information cascade people will follow the public information of what others are doing and may ignore their personal signals that indicate doing the opposite. While Roma touches on how people may also just follow the majority because they may be getting a direct benefit from doing so, she explains that this is a different theory and not necessarily related. Next comes the part that I found to be interesting. Roma explains that information may not be the only thing building information cascades, but also personal reputations. She discusses how people will often fake public preferences in order to save face, while still maintaining an opposite, private preference. She says that this makes the cascade stronger, as people have incentives to ignore new information. With this she stresses the importance of free thinkers as a means to help prevent false cascades from happening. This is a point that she connects to Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein’s theory of “availability cascades,” which once started people will not go against as nobody is willing to risk their credibility.
This connects very well with the material that we have covered relating to information cascades. Sofia Roma, as well as Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein whom she credits, take what we discussed in class to a different level by adding an additional layer of thought to keep in mind. I had never considered how the participants ideas of how other people will view them would affect how people would behave and therefore the cascade. The potential loss of credibility from going against the cascade, even when correct, seems like it would constitute a potential negative direct benefit and the gaining of reputation by following the cascade, even while holding counter beliefs, seems like it would constitute a positive direct benefit. I’d be really curious to see how these would affect some of the examples that we covered in class, in the textbook, and in the problem sets.