34 GENIUS INTERVIEW Taha Yasseri
met and are not going to meet. When I see a video on YouTube has been watched four billion times, I have no idea who these people are, but this number is very intimidating. I would feel left out if I didn’t join that huge group of people who have shared this experience. FEED: How do online social networks amplify that already existing tendency? TAHA YASSERI: Online, we are bombarded with social information and are therefore much more vulnerable to making our decisions based on other people’s choices. And there have been multiple experiments reporting and quantifying this effect. It is here in our nature, but it’s not entirely based on online platforms. The first question to ask is: what exactly is being spread on our social networks, beyond the spreading phenomenon itself? The spreading phenomenon is just a tool, but what is being spread? It could be fake news, a rumour, destructive information or it could be good habits, new fashions, trends or a catchy song. You can’t really criticise the phenomenon of social influence just on its own. There have been amazing experiments recently done by Sinan Aral from MIT, who showed social contagion between people who use Nike running apps. They showed that if my friends run on a given day, I’m much more likely to go out and run as well. This is significant social influence I’m getting from my friends. But it’s for good, because we have seen that running and exercise is a positive thing. Now if, instead of jogging, we talk about a piece of fake news or a wrong belief, obviously that could be negative. FEED: Do numbers create influence? If I look at a Twitter account with 50 followers, am I less likely to pay attention to it than if it’s an account with 500 followers? TAHA YASSERI: Absolutely. It has been reported on many different occasions. We ran a real-world experiment in one of the
museums in Oxford. We asked visitors of the museum to choose their favourite picture from nine pictures on the same wall. We gave them an iPad showing thumbnails of the same pictures and they could choose their own favourite. To half of them, we gave an iPad that showed the live stats for each picture up to that moment, so they could see what other people had chosen as their favourite pictures. In both groups, the same picture was the winner of the competition, but in the group that could see the number of votes cast for each picture, the winner won with a much bigger margin – there was no chance for the second and third pictures to ever catch up with it. True, it was a nicer, more attractive picture, but there was this feedback effect. People, in the moment they were about to cast their vote, could
see “Oh, this is popular”, and they were much more likely to choose the one other people had already selected. When people left the room, we showed them these results. People in the art world think they have strong opinions when it comes to art. They will say, “No, I have chosen based on my tastes. I wasn’t influenced.” And it was hard for us to pinpoint individuals and say, “No, you were influenced by others,” but we could see collectively there was a significant difference between people choosing on their own and people who received the information about other people’s choices. That’s why every now and then, we see something on social media that goes madly viral, like the Instagram egg a few months ago. There is no content, nothing there you could say people really liked. It’s just a picture of an egg. But through the same processes, through copying other people’s behaviour and the feeling we are part of the group, there is a strong force that can, to a great extent, affect our behaviour and what we do. FEED: Is the idea ‘people will look at something and make their own critical value judgement’ fading? Is there a shift now where facts matter less?
WHEN I SEE A VIDEO ON YOUTUBE HAS BEENWATCHED FOUR BILLION TIMES, I HAVE NO IDEA WHO THESE PEOPLE ARE, BUT THIS NUMBER IS VERY INTIMIDATING
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