RT Monograph
SR 00
A1 Gelastopoulos, Alexandros
A1 Analytis, Pantelis
A1 Le Mens, Gael
A1 Van De Rijt, Arnout
T1 The marginal majority effect: when social influence produces lock-in
YR 2024
FD 2024-07-22
SP 35
K1 social influence
K1 self-reinforcing process
K1 self-correcting process
K1 marginal majority
K1 lock-in
AB 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.
T2 arXiv
PB arXiv
PP Toulouse
AV Published
LK https://publications.ut-capitole.fr/id/eprint/50585/
UL http://tse-fr.eu/pub/130403