Online ‘Likes’ Herd Others to Similar Views, Study Finds
C Frank0 stashed this in Social
Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-08...
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6146/647.abstract?sid=f2376a31-9ad7-49c9-8237-d2e5fda27592
Positive opinions are more influential than negative ones, at least on the Internet.
If an article is “liked” on a website such as Facebook or Reddit, new readers are more likely to approve of it, according to a study published in the journal Science. While the positive reactions create a “herding” effect, the authors said, negative views don’t appear to affect people the same way.
Stashed in: Facebook!, Reddit!, Science!, Influence!, Zuck!, Social Media, Winner take all., LIKE, Psychology!, Echo Chambers!
So this kind of implicit peer pressure is likely to affect the collective hive mind:
Positive social influence increased the likelihood of positive ratings by 32% and created accumulating positive herding that increased final ratings by 25% on average. This positive herding was topic-dependent and affected by whether individuals were viewing the opinions of friends or enemies. A mixture of changing opinion and greater turnout under both manipulations together with a natural tendency to up-vote on the site combined to create the herding effects. Such findings will help interpret collective judgment accurately and avoid social influence bias in collective intelligence in the future.
11:22 AM Aug 09 2013