The limits of peer pressure: Ganging up can backfire
- Sun, September 18 2011
- Filed under: Marketing essentials
If you’re trying to sway people to go with the crowd, you can go too far.
This according to a study featured on the HP blog and described by Mashable:
HP Labs computers scientists, including veteran online behavior researcher Bernardo Huberman, asked 600 participants to answer a few simple questions about online photos. Which of two baby pictures is cuter, and which of these two couches (above) would you choose to buy for a friend?
Whichever one they chose, the researchers rigged it so the other picture was shown to be more popular, using a Facebook-style Like system. The participants then had a chance to change their minds. Each time, however, they changed the number of Likes each picture got, and waited for a different length of time before giving them a second chance.
The result: 22% of people were swayed by the peer pressure — but only if there was a long gap between the first and second chance. Given the chance to change their mind immediately, only 14% of participants did so.
Most interestingly, people were only likely to change their minds if there were a moderate number of Likes on the other side. As soon as the Likes on their choice of picture were outweighed by 20 times or more, participants dug in their heels and stuck with their original choice.
The bottom line? When someone feels like lots of people disagree with them, they harden their position rather than being swayed to change. If you want to get people on your side, don’t hit them with extreme numbers that make them feel unpopular or marginalized.
