TY  - RPRT
CY  - Toulouse
ID  - publications50585
UR  - http://tse-fr.eu/pub/130403
A1  - Gelastopoulos, Alexandros
A1  - Analytis, Pantelis
A1  - Le Mens, Gael
A1  - Van De Rijt, Arnout
Y1  - 2024/07/22/
N2  - 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.
PB  - arXiv
T3  - arXiv
KW  - social influence
KW  - self-reinforcing process
KW  - self-correcting process
KW  - marginal majority
KW  - lock-in
M1  - working_paper
TI  - The marginal majority effect: when social influence produces lock-in
AV  - public
EP  - 35
ER  -