%0 Report
%9 Working Paper
%A Gelastopoulos, Alexandros
%A Analytis, Pantelis
%A Le Mens, Gael
%A Van De Rijt, Arnout
%B arXiv
%C Toulouse
%D 2024
%F publications:50585
%I Université Toulouse Capitole
%K social influence
%K self-reinforcing process
%K self-correcting process
%K marginal majority
%K lock-in
%T The marginal majority effect: when social influence produces lock-in
%U https://publications.ut-capitole.fr/id/eprint/50585/
%X People are influenced by the choices of others, a phenomenon observed across contexts in the social and behavioral sciences. Social influence can lock in an initial popularity advantage of an option over a higher quality alternative. Yet several experiments designed to enable social influence have found that social systems self-correct rather than lock-in. Here we identify a behavioral phenomenon that makes inferior lock-in possible, which we call the ‘marginal majority effect’: A discontinuous increase in the choice probability of an option as its popularity exceeds that of a competing option. We demonstrate the existence of marginal majority effects in several recent experiments and show that lock-in always occurs when the effect is large enough to offset the quality effect on choice, but rarely otherwise. Our results reconcile conflicting past empirical evidence and connect a behavioral phenomenon to the possibility of social lock-in.