%S arXiv
%A Alexandros Gelastopoulos
%A Pantelis Analytis
%A Gael Le Mens
%A Arnout Van De Rijt
%T The marginal majority effect: when social influence produces lock-in
%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.
%K social influence
%K self-reinforcing process
%K self-correcting process
%K marginal majority
%K lock-in
%B arXiv
%D 2024
%C Toulouse
%I arXiv
%L publications50585