The Social Web Herd Mentality

It's only been in the past five years or so that we've seen the social web revolution roll out. And sociologists and psychiatrists should be watching with interest, because there's a gold mine of research just lying around waiting to be scooped up.

One effect we've noticed is the herd mentality. Sites like Digg, Reddit, and Slashdot allow peer submission and peer moderation. The result is that popular ideas get voted up, while dissenting views get modded down. And that creates a polarizing effect, where popular ideas draw even more supporters, while less popular ideas get shoved into the shadowy corner, where they never break free.

Yet the crowd isn't always right; in fact, it's frequently proved wrong. Look how many buyout rumors, vaporware announcements, and market predictions in the technology field alone have been boldly made, widely accepted, and fizzled out. So pervasive is this effect of social media that its spawned several terms to describe it:

- Groupthink. Where group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas.

- The Bandwagon effect. Where people do and believe things because many other people do and believe the same things.

- Opinion leadership. Where one person interprets ideas so that others can digest them easily, and the opinion followers look up to that person.

- Crowd psychology. Where ordinary people gain more direct power by acting collectively than they would if acting alone.

This affects the idea economy. If information is the currency of Internet culture, as is frequently cited, then herd mentality shapes the market of ideas. Sort of like a stock market, an idea's perceived value rises and falls with the number of people "invested" in it. But unlike stocks, which rise and fall incrementally, ideas on the social web tend to stay low in ranking until they reach a critical mass of adopters, and then they shoot up the scale. Suddenly everyone is talking about it! Then it falls, pushed over the cliff by the next idea to come up the scale.

A related idea is that groups which hang out together tend to stick up for each other. As can be seen on MySpace and FaceBook, members of a tribe will work to promote each other. When one of them makes a submission to Digg.com, they notify their tribe so they can all go vote it up.

What we end up with is the cliques of the school age again, without the restraint of having to be polite about it when we deal with others face to face.

It's just something to keep in mind if you participate in social networks. It isn't that the link you submitted wasn't likable, it's that you didn't have enough friends watching to vote you up yet. Gaining that critical mass of friends, however, is a challenge that most find too daunting. That's the thing that keeps herd mentality going; it isn't unbreakable, but breaking it appears to outsiders to be more trouble than it's worth.

Filed Under: Mobile Internet • The Internetz