Some people couldn’t get enough waiting for their Facebook posts or photos to go trending with multiple likes and comments. Some even attribute popularity on the numbers. However, a new research suggests that some have used this idea to manipulate the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ and sway others judgment based on the number of likes and false comments.
Sinan Aral, lead author of the study and a network scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and his colleagues studied the crowd’s behavior by manipulating them through false information. They wanted to find out if people’s judgments are easily affected by a group’s opinion over something less tangible disguised to be solid information.
The research team had collaborated with a popular news website to facilitate the study. They didn’t disclose the names of the sites as they are planning to use them again to conduct another social experiment with them. The website lets the readers leave comments and vote each comment up (positive) and down (negative). The vote counts were visible and were chronologically arranged. Stories received an average of 10 comments and three votes for each comment. Their study ran for five months.
After five months, the researchers analyzed how users rated the comments. There was over 100,000 comments that were viewed over 10 million times and rated by over 300,000 times.
Their conclusion was that the crowd is more herd-like than sensible. Those that they have purposely planted with fake positive votes had collected over 32 percent more positive votes compared to the ‘control’ comment. After their final computation, they have decided that the positively manipulated comments had received about 25 percent more positive votes in an average. However, those that they have voted negatively as part of the manipulation still received an ‘up’ vote by some users.
Aral admitted that though they were not able to show the psychology affecting people’s decisions, they were able to provide more insightful evidence that there are still some people who are more skeptical of negative social opinions. Most would rather choose to agree with an opinion that was voted positive by a larger group.
The study was published in the online journal Science.
