Mean Girls – Explaining the Unexplainable Social Phenomenon with Information Cascades
Many of us can think of a time that someone more socially powerful than us has made us or our friends feel bad. We are left wondering why mean people come into social power when the majority of people don’t like them? We can answer this question through information cascades.
Every group of friends is governed by a social hierarchy no matter how subtle, and many have a phenomenon of a “Queen Bee”, a singular group of mean girls or boys that have immense social power over everyone else. So how did our bees get there? This is a perfect example of an information cascade, which happens when the general consensus on a decision is not congruent with everyone’s own private information. In this case, the decision is whether or not to give them power, and the private information is whether that person was nice or not.
To explore how this happens, let’s imagine everyone in a large social group meeting each other for the first time. We will also operate under the assumption that no one can see the other’s private information.
Let’s say each person meets Regina George from Mean Girls. Regina is not very nice. However, In order to start an information cascade, she only needs to be nice to the first two people she meets. Once the cascade has started, she could be nasty to everyone else and have no repercussions because everyone is under the assumption that she is powerful or sometimes even that she is a nice person.
If Regina is not nice but is strategic about it, she can gain power and be liked without being nice most of the time.
If we have the sequence of HHLLLLLLLLL, though there are more bad experiences, the third person will flag it as a good experience because the first two flagged it as a good experience and they will be influenced by them. In this situation, it can look like giving someone the benefit of the doubt, or even ignoring mean behavior to “fit in”.
If we have the sequence of HLHLHLHHL, then Regina may need to be more strategic with being nice in order to maintain her social standing.
It is through this information cascade thinking that these complex social phenomena begin to make a lot of sense. It also shows why most people who are not nice but are “popular” or powerful often don’t maintain that power for a long time. In Mean Girls, the social hierarchy crumbled. We can reference the second cascade which shows an imperfectly strategic behavioral streak. Since no one is perfect or can really have a sense of how their actions will affect others, most mean people will have this cascade which has to be strategically balanced and is much easier to lose.