humbobJan 11, 2010 09:30:59 GMT
Can you persuade someone to like a product by telling them that it’s popular? Do teenagers like Taylor Swift because she’s good or because everyone else they know likes her — so hey, she must be good, right?
Sociologist Robert Merton dubbed this tendency to base what we think we think on what other people are doing the “self-fulfilling prophecy” in 1949, and since then social scientists have tried to measure how powerful it actually is. Now, based on some studies conducted with the help of the Internet, it seems clear that we’re often just sheep.
Slate describes an experiment in which people are asked to rate relatively unknown songs. They can see the ratings of others and the experimenters measure how much people seemed to be influenced by existing ratings by analysing the extent to which the value of songs ranges each time the experiment is run. Although some songs performed consistently a little better or worse, success seemed to randomly follow populism for most of them.
“About half” – that’s how much people seemed to be influenced in their musical tastes by pure group think.
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