Off We Go

Abstract

Unfortunately, that’s not all there is to say about that, even though the information age provides virtual oceans of information. First of all, information on which trivial as well crucial decisions are based may be tampered with, and second, personal belief, deliberation, decision, and action are influenced by what other people think or do. The aggregated opinion of others may influence our personal viewpoints. A paper was recently published in Science (Muchnik et al. 2013) that described an experiment on a social news aggregator platform and online rating system, the result of which testifies to massive social influence bias on individual users. On an unidentified crowd-based opinion aggregator system ostensibly “similar to Digg.com and Reddit.com,” the status of 101,281 comments made by users over a five-month period with more than ten million views and rated 308,515 times, was monitored. In collaboration with the service, the researchers had rigged the setup in such a way that whenever a user left a comment, it was automatically rendered with either a positive “upvote,” a negative “downvote” or no vote at all for control. Now, here is a key to the experiment: If a comment received just a single upvote, the likelihood of receiving another upvote for the first user to see it was 32 % relative to the control group. Additionally, chances were higher that such comments would proliferate in, or lemming to, popularity, as the upvote group had on average a 25 % greater rating than the control group. One of the lessons from this experiment is that

The information in the world doubles every day. What they don’t tell us is that our wisdom is cut in half at the same time.

—Joey Novick