Clive Thompson over at wired.com wrote an interesting article about how what we like is affected by what people around us like. Most people will recognise this and psychologists call this phenomenon peer pressure. It’s strongest in teens, as every parent who has teen kids can affirm. In adults the process is much more subtle. Group Think, as Thompson calls it, is in psychology something entirely different. In a groupthink situation you’ve got a group who is very close and communicates in jargon. They all think along the same lines and often are led by a directive leader who tells them what to do. What happens next is that they fail to come up with the best solutions because there’s no creativity in the thinking process. In small groups this is too bad for those involved, but it can be very dangerous when it happens to large societies, for instance like the German society during 1933 − 1945.
Peer pressure is a psychological mechanism in which we compare our likes to others. Humans are behaving like herds in this respect, because people tend to like what their peers like. That’s why the advertising industry goes into great pains to promote an article to very targeted audiences. They want to convey the message that peers like this article, so you like it, too. Therefore you want to have it, too.
In the wired article, an experiment is described in which a group is confronted with music they can download. It’s a database of songs which the subjects can rate and download. Other people in the group will be able to see the ratings and the downloads of all the songs. By repeating the same experiment a number of times with different groups of people, you can investigate if people like certain songs because of their quality or because their peers also liked it. The latter seems to be the case. Also when you manipulate the ratings and downloads, people still are going to like the songs they think their peers do like too. However, this only worked for a short time, in the long run the songs being lied about became less popular. So lying only works for a short time.
I wonder how this works with the different social networks we have got now. I know listening to last.fm and having access to my neighbours’ playlists made me discover and enjoy new music I still listen to, despite the fact I’m not using last.fm anymore because it’s not free anymore for my country. I also notice how people try to use the social media for marketing, advertising. People pioneering in it do that so blatantly and aggressively that I started to unfollow people who posted ads on Twitter, thus polluting my feed.
I don’t think tweets like “Wanna get rich fast, click on this link and find out how” are effective. I do think Twitter and other social media as marketing tools can be effective. It will cost more time to invest in, so possibly advertising on Twitter will cost a company more money, but the effect will be much bigger than TV and radio commercials. It’s more expensive because the agents who advertise products will need to genuinely engage in conversation with their target group, they need to make real online friends. And then they can start twittering on how they are drinking a can of Brand X soda and how good it is. Or that they are investigating insurance companies and ask for input only to reply later that they found out that Insurance Company Y has the best deal. If you’re a hub (someone with a lot of followers) these tactics can be very effective just because they don’t look like ads. They’re very subtle.
On the other hand, I don’t know how ethical this would be, because people would need to pretend they’re friending people on networks out of interest in the other person where they are not. They are only smart marketeers. We’ll see how this turns out.
Links:
- The article on wired.com
- Wikipedia on groupthink
- Wikipedia on peer pressure
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