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<\/a>The ultimate decision – which one do you choose and why?<\/p><\/div>\n
Everyday people are making decisions of various levels of importance, however few stop to seriously analyse and understand the underlying cognitive processes\u00a0involved. Often decisions are influenced by a phenomenon called the \u2018bandwagon effect\u2019 whether this occurs consciously or unconsciously. Bandwagon effect is the idea that people align with or follow the opinions, beliefs and\/or actions the majority of the population follows. An example of this phenomenon is illustrated in a study conducted by Sundar, Knobloch-Westerwick and Hastall (2007). When people were given a choice between reading an article recommended by a journalist, website or by crowd support, people were more inclined to choose the crowd option. This is despite the journalist being an acknowledged expert in the particular field.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Did you pick it because of the number of stars?<\/p><\/div>\n There are entire industries built on the assumption of \u2018the bandwagon effect\u2019, like Yelp, Rotten Tomato, and Google Reviews. The twenty-first century reality of 24\/7 access to portable technology allows consumers to seek extra help when making any decision. Two common ways this happens are by trawling the comment section on websites and looking at the number of stars other users have allotted. To further explore this idea Xu, Hao and Younbo (2016) conducted a study looking at the impact bandwagon cues have on individuals during the process of media content selection of Hollywood movies. Xu and colleagues (2016) decided to specifically look\u00a0at quantitative and qualitative categories. The quantitative category referred to information such as number of hits, views, and downloads, while the qualitative category studied reviews and comments. The results of this study show that individuals want\u00a0to watch movies with the highest qualitative and quantitative rankings, even when\u00a0the movies are\u00a0very similar. This demonstrates\u00a0the presence of the bandwagon effect with\u00a0people making\u00a0decisions according to what others opinions are.<\/p>\n While there wasn\u2019t a difference between the bandwagon effects of quantitative versus qualitative individually, there was a difference when other elements were involved. When participant\u2019s cognitive loads were increased by having to do a distractor task while selecting a movie it leaves limited resources to focus on the movie information. In this study the distractor task was repeating a word over and over, but having a conversation with a friend could have a similar effect. Participants then resorted to heuristic processing, which is a nonlogical approach to form\u00a0a decision instead of the more analytical process.\u00a0Heuristic processing\u00a0involves\u00a0minimal effort in order to\u00a0access information from prior knowledge broadly reflecting an automatic process (McBride & Cutting, 2015). The results demonstrate that when people are\u00a0not able to carefully evaluate information, they are\u00a0more inclined to rely on quantitative information such as the number of likes, instead of reviews and comments because it is a more automatic process.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n Other research suggests that bandwagon cues, which provide consensus that predecessors enjoyed the product, affect people\u2019s judgements of websites or products making them more inclined to buy, watch, or experience a product. To test the effects of these bandwagon cues Kim and Gambino (2016) used the Modality-Agency-Interactivity-Navigability (MAIN) model. This model gave insight into people\u2019s opinions of the websites and products as well as specifically providing information regarding the changes in users impressions after exposure to bandwagon cues. An online experiment, using a mock restaurant recommendation site that manipulated the number of stars the restaurants had was conducted. The findings demonstrated that bandwagon cues resulted in more positive perception and a higher likelihood of the participants visiting the restaurant. This is important to understand considering bandwagon\u00a0cues, such as ratings and reviews similar to the ones on restaurant websites, are everywhere and it is important to know the extent of their influence.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n Are you making decisions based on the herd?<\/p><\/div>\n The affects of band wagoning outlined above are relatively harmless, however there are certain cases where the ‘bandwagon effect’ has a serious impact across society. For example the extent of influence the phenomenon has on the results of political elections. Elections of different scales are occurring all the time and typically the outcomes have an immense influence on society. Simon\u2019s (1954) study specifically looks at if there are widely publicized election predictions will voters be more inclined to vote for the candidate who seems most likely to win according to the published poll data. Before candidate predication polls were published participants were asked who they were voting for. Once the polls were released participants were asked again and Simon tracked whether people\u2019s votes changed according to who was predicted to win. The results of this study provided evidence for the \u2018bandwagon effect\u2019 suggesting that after polls are released people are more likely to support the predicted winning candidate.<\/a><\/p>\n Why does it matter if we are unknowingly falling victim to the bandwagon effect? Well it should be clear now that your small and large scale decisions are being influenced by outside opinions\u00a0more than you may realise. Especially with the\u00a0increasing immediate access\u00a0of the greater populations judgements and beliefs\u00a0it can be easy to slip into the habit of making\u00a0decisions according\u00a0to the best reviews or most likes. While this doesn\u2019t mean you should\u00a0analyse and overthink every day-to-day decision you make, you should be aware of how and why you are making certain decisions. So, when the time comes for you to make a decision of consequence I suggest ask yourself: \u201cAm I falling victim to the bandwagon effect\u201d.<\/p>\n References<\/p>\n Kim, J.,& Gambino, A. (2016). Do we trust the crowd or information system? Effects of personalization and bandwagon cues on users\u2019 attitudes and behavioural intentions toward a restaurant recommendation website. Computers In Human Behavior<\/em>, 65369-379. doi:10.1016\/j.chb.2016.08.038<\/p>\n McBride, D. M., & Cutting, J. C. (2015). Cognitive psychology: Theory, process, and methodology.<\/em> SAGE Publications.<\/p>\n Simon, H. (1954). Bandwagon and underdog effects and the possibility of election predictions.\u00a0The Public Opinion Quarterly,<\/em>\u00a018<\/em>(3), 245-253. Retrieved from http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/2745982<\/a><\/p>\n Sundar, S. S., Knobloch-Westerwick, S. and Hastall, M. R. (2007), News cues: Information scent and cognitive heuristics. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci., 58: 366\u2013378. doi:10.1002\/asi.20511\u00a0http:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/10.1002\/asi.20511\/epdf<\/a><\/p>\n Xu, X., Hao, X., & Younbo, J. (2015). An information-procession model for audiences selections of movies quantitative versus qualitiative bandwagon effects. Journal of Media Psychology<\/em>. Retrieved from http:\/\/psycnet.apa.org\/journals\/jmp\/28\/4\/187.pdf&productCode=pa<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Do you ever find yourself wondering what clothing to buy? What TV series or movie to watch? Or even where to eat? These are common dilemmas all of us run into on a daily basis. If you selected the movie or item that\u00a0had the most stars or likes attributed to it or the majority of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6788,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[266316,130416],"tags":[130382,149730,54559],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2535"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6788"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2535"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3789,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2535\/revisions\/3789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/a>