Justin Timberlake - Culture - Hollywood - Idea Lab - New York Times - The Diigo Meta page

• 24 Dec 07
  

  eyal matsliah

  culture duncan-j-watts network-effect social-influence social-web sociology

  • The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect.
  • What we found, however, was exactly the opposite. In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict. Introducing social influence into human decision making, in other words, didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.

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