Social Influence in Sociology | UCD Lecture

[00:00:00]okay guys let's get started with the lecture today today we will talk about social influence social influence and before I get to that let me remind you that actually this first take-home test is coming up so um the first take-home tests will be posted on blackboard as advertised on the 14th of October at 4:00 p.m. that's a Sunday that's the dates when it's going to be online and then you have 72 hours to complete this take home test on Thursday I will do a quick demonstration that you actually see you where you have to click and I don't know and how the whole thing looked like but essentially it is all through blackboard under assessment you will be prompted questions sometimes stupid questions about the readings that you guys have to do up to now and the whole point of this exercise is for you to catch up on the readings so some of the question I really stupid questions about I don't know what is this number bla or something like that yeah it's really just for you to to go down into the readings you have 72 hours to catch up on that yeah any questions about this at the moment yeah yes yeah you can post so there's 72 hours in total that's a lot under of it you can even get a questions ago I don't know that answer let's go and do that reading and then you do it and then you'll know the answer I know but you cannot you cannot go back and questions will most likely be randomized as well alright so in a random order so it could be that you get different questions you know any other questions yeah okay so on Thursday I will do a quick demonstration that you see how it how it looks like yeah but not too much about this okay let's all read about the topic today so this is what I brought with me um first of all I want to talk about social influence in general and then I want to home in on to mile landmark studies in this field one is called the medical innovation study it's a study by paul lazarsfeld and others and it's really about this idea of how social influence actually matters how networks matter for the adoption of what individuals do now and we're going to put that in this whole context of this micro macro link but here it's about how macro level phenomena affect micro level individual behavior and then the second study is called the cultural market study it's a more recent study but it's equally a milestone landmark study by Duncan Watts and and it's this organic and Peter dots they published actually two papers in science about that you had to read one book chapter about this but it's actually based on two science papers that those guys wrote so it's actually pretty cool stuff and the reason why that was such a milestone at the time is because they showed how with the experiments how networks actually can have a macro level implication so then we take it up again from the micro to the macro level now and then we will talk about unpretty unpredictability and about inequality these are sort of like the things but this is a very nice design study as well but before we do that I want to do a little experiment with you guys so in order to do that I'm going to show you a little video so please watch very carefully there will be questions about this afterwards [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so um it's an experiment it looks like magic I think it's pretty cool I've seen a couple you guys yawning yeah some of you multiple times I feel whenever teach that afterwards I have to yawn for the rest of the day this is but this is nothing specific to us you know Ashley this totally works in public settings if you want to keep this little try go somewhere in the arts cafe you know and have like a you're kind of you know obviously on chances are and actually it works in half and in 50% of the cases that but then somebody in the in the alleviates environment in a bird will start yawning as well its various actually the same thing works with laughing as well you see I don't know sometimes you can have this hysterical laughing attacks where somebody starts laughing that other people start laughing I think you don't even know what you're what you're lacking about anymore it is you not me because everybody else is laughing but with yawning that's actually one of those really weird things that we actually don't really understand believe it or not it's really contested wise until dawn its we don't really know it there's no no evolutionary necessity for it it's very some people argue it's about empathy in a way and some studies actually showed that some serious studies show that dogs are more likely to yawn when they are ona yawns than when a random person yawns they actually the other study is that so you want to read up on this that's more about your needle is shown yawning this more that shows it's actually age related so this works more in younger populations that was another yawn there you go actually me just talking about yawning and another yawn just repeating the word yawning makes you yawn and that's kind of crazy when you think about it because what the is going on there is no there's no there's no nothing that is being being spreads there's no virus or anything but so be to observe that your socially contagious actually almost acts like a disease it spreads from one to the yet and actually do have a couple of photo phenomena that kind of operate like that and this is sort of where the whole I don't know for me which is why it's studying social networks so much because I think they are fundamental to to our our human and social life this is the fabric on which we act under which he behave and so many things are connected with each other and so many of our behaviors work on that network structure where we are dependent on what the people around us to us but in fact we're not really aware of that and that's our like my little mission against that and quite a big jungle sociology where people actually study individuals in isolation from each other I kind of cut I don't understand that sorry commit this is much more based to reality that I mean we can think about how things are connected as it turns out no that's not just yawning but actually we can we can show that the same holds for obesity there are studies that show that obesity is contagious when your friends are obese you're more likely to become obese as well we know the same thing is crying when you're when your friends kind of commit crime you're more likely to commit crime sadly the same thing holds for suicide there's a contagion effect is documented divorce you're more likely to get divorced when your friends get divorced fact the universe having babies yeah smoking and even getting your job is contagious right so that's very very strange so now I have a little bit of an exercise for you guys I just I want you to be aware of this phenomena a little more so why don't we just take two minutes we're in small little groups you guys talk about other social phenomena where you think that behaves like a social contagion like this no behavior spreads even though there is no physical virus or nothing physical being transmitted from one person to the other now it's the two minutes and then we talk about it [Music] [Music] I think I said scope here actually I heard a couple of very interesting examples you know like for example how stuff is being posted on Facebook and then you start liking it because others liked it there's a whole other dimension to it which is highly problematic would be a Katya wealth is like how how we observe our world in a biased way but we're not really aware of it right and actually in fact I do a bit a little bit of research on this area about how we experience our world in a distorted way and what the importance of network structure is in their context but then you kind of see it I don't know you start liking it because others already like it oh yeah yeah it's somebody selected so it can't be that bad right or somebody else mentioned the thing of taking notes when other people around you take notes when I was bringing up the notion of what is called rational invitation because they are actually you know it might make sense you might think oh maybe I missed something maybe the person makes me actually got something or has more knowledge than I have and maybe because of that if that is important even though right now I don't really think it is important but the point of this exercise was that you realize about how much of our social life we're social net social networks but social influence in particular matter alright and how they died our life sometimes in ways that we are hardly hottia well one of the funnel in the experiment I always do you know I was just six months in Switzerland here in Switzerland people follow the rules you know so they're they love their order in a way and there's a red traffic light and everybody stops and I'm being the sociologist living in Ireland I just walk over it yeah but then what you see is actually then other people follow so even there you can see these kind of effects happening actually I was thinking about doing that in Ireland but you know it's actually really problematic to find something but actually people follow orders the beginning so I would have loved to do this experiment but I didn't come up with one yeah we're actually that that order you see adhered in the first instance and then norm breaking behavior actually is a social influence phenomena but anyway so let's put this a little bit in more term social influence they talk about people influencing each other a definition that I have here now is social influence we can define it as change in an individual's thoughts feelings attitudes or behaviors that result from interaction with another individual or group I'm sorry generic the definition that we have here and now what I want to do with you I want to put that in this context of this micro macro schema that we talked about last week remember we have like macro level phenomena you know we want to connect them into each other want to explain them analytical ology is about but we need to think about individuals only individuals act individuals are embedded in social context they do something and then you know it transforms in an aggregate so let's fill that a little bit was context so we have social networks right we have some structure you are embedded in networks that you are not aware of you don't even see this structure yeah because you only have you a little fish view on that whole thing but believe me there is a structure behind here and that's the kind of stuff that I study all the time and where most of my research is about that structure of that pattern and that substrate on which social action occurs and that kind of affects micro level behavior individuals some action occurs and then we have some indications following from that and what I'm doing now now I have like two studies you know these two landmark studies the medical innovation study in the cultural market studies they focus on two aspects within that context the first one the medical innovation study looks at how social networks actually affect individuals and then how they do something in this case is the adoption of prescribing of certain drugs of your neck like GPS it's actually about the introduction of a new antibiotic back in the days and they figured out that actually it really matters whether your friends already prescribed that or not as a doctor and then you started prescribing it as well all right so this there's some some evidence and there's lots of evidence but this is meant by study in that regard about how networks metaphor adoption household influence plays a role then for the adoption of a certain behavior and then in the second half I want to get to this point and this is the cultural market studies where we look at how when individuals behave in a certain way how that actually then aggregated up again to macro level phenomena like inequality and unpredictability so we have these two studies the medical innovation study which basically says that social networks shaped sort of influence and then we have the cultural market studies that social influence needs macro level implications for example inequality o-o unpredictability okay so let me get started with the first study that I want to talk about it's a medical innovation study you know as I said this is a landmark study for a couple of reasons I don't know just scale it with at the time but then also you know like this solid empirical research it's not as old as you might think you know people only started around that time we're very serious about their research methods how do they collect data you know like have evidence not just theorizing stuff you know a lot of soldiers do that it's just zero except they just make stuff up you know and they call it a theory and it's important I think it's very important but you know at the end everybody can make stuff up yeah I don't know I can I can have lots of brain farts during the day but so what yeah so I really believe in having great parts and combining them with solid evidence that you have actually good support for for your theory or your idea that you're having so the the study was unique in in that sense or it kind of paved the way for later research so I study by James Coleman I really heard the guy in here cots and Herbert Mansell and they focus on this essentially what they did they looked at the prescription as I said of a new antibiotic drug right back in the days again something that was hard to imagine a world without antibiotics but those days and it varies with new thing and they different kinds of antibiotics and there was a new antibiotic coming onto the market that was clearly better than the other ones and in this case it was like a study that was actually funded by Pfizer at the time that produced is this new antibiotic tetracycline still used today and they looked at the adoption of that so they wanted to know what drives what makes GPS prescribe this drug and the idea was that social influence matters here and that's where the study is also like a landmark study it's like the beginning the first hard evidence that we have for social interest so they collect the data in the 1950s you know just after the introduction of this new drug the interviewed doctors in for Illinois cities and in what innovative design they sampled prescription records in the first three days of the month and the way they did that they actually went to the pharmacist and they asked him how many times did somebody bring a prescription of tetracycline so they had some solid evidence for that right for the prescription of drugs also the one who can all like is there an effect is there like a social influence with regard to the prescription of the drugs and they went through the prescriptions and on these prescriptions here they looked at the dates like when was the drug describes when the doctor start prescribing this new drug and then they could actually track it down when when kind of after the release of these new drugs which doctor started using these clearly advantageous drugs over some others so far so good so what Holmen and others also did you know then they then they kind of went to to those GPS I think they were around 400 of them in these four cities they talked to all of them are most of them and they asked them who are your friends among your colleagues they asked them with whom do you often discuss your cases and to whom to your from turn for advice on information or information these things are what we nowadays will call network generators they're different kind of questions with different types of relationships yeah but one was really friendship the other one was was sort of like discuss a discussion and the third one was advice the different kinds of relationship they often overlap but they do not necessarily have to overlap and then they kind of use that information and that's what we call sociometric data he's a basically network data that they collected like pools friends with whom amongst those 400 GPS in the area and then they kind of combined that with the information about when those guys started to prescribe those drugs kind of funny people kind of keep your name no but set up with the problem with this lecture there are girls on believe me even after this lecture you might still yawn so anyway so this is sort of like their main finding if we quickly walk you through that what that means this is a graph very simple at the end of the day there's nothing nothing wrong with simple graphs on big fan of simple graphs if you can express something in a simple way express it in a simple way thank you much harder to express something in a simple way than in a complicated way so on the one axis on the what we call the x axis this one right we have the months after release of this struck here they give it a fake name but it will state recycling basically giving it the time that passes and on the y axis the x is going upwards this like the community proportion of doctors who prescribe this drug like this won't be worn when everybody prescribes that bra so you see after 70 months everybody I don't know a lot most people turn to this new antibiotic because it's it's better than the alternatives that were available so far less side effects same effect actually better effect and so on right so this is you see like the adoption that sort of what this what this maps out but now you see three different lines so what do these three different lines stand for well now they kind of actually separated on the friendship information these four hundred doctors into three different groups they separate them in one group with no friends among those other four hundred doctors second group with one or two friends among those other four hundred doctors in the third group individuals that have three or more friends among those are the four hundred doctors and what you see here now basically the adoption is faster among those guys that are connectives the curve goes higher up faster like when you have three or more friends you are kind of more likely to kind of have adopted the drug after let's say eight months then if you would have had no friends among those at the four hundred doctors so that sort of evidence that that that suggests that actually the net rate matters here that social influence matters here because people are that's the argument because people are embedded in these networks they hear from their other friends who are also doctors that the hurtness heard about this new drug it's great it does the job and then they start adopting it themselves so that was the evidence for social influence being being prevalent here so the doctors who were mentioned by their colleagues as friend adviser or discussion partner they repeated that little graph I just showed it to you for the friendship prescribe the new drug on average earlier than those who were named by few or none of their colleagues results also show the network mattered more at the beginning of the adoption face if you would actually track down who actually prescribed the drug there the network's mattered more then later on kind of makes sense at the end everybody adopted it anyway while at first these channels are more important so the importance of these channels changes and they also showed I didn't show you the results but it's like in another paper the different kinds of network ties matter at different points in time at first discussion advice network mattered later on the Frenchy Network mattered more doctors were also more influenced by others in uncertain situations in treatments whose effects aren't clear so basically when they didn't really when there was an uncertain situation then they were even more likely to get influenced by other people so I don't make sense you know like I don't know if you have your own idea if you're very certain about what you're doing and the world around you to do whatever it wants if you're kind of less certain about then you're more susceptible to certain lipids so that sort of like the evidence our network structure kind of leads to micro level behavior and the adoption of certain behavior in this case the prescription of this law let me now move on and move to the second study that I want to talk about today that's like the cultural market size and that is reading that you guys got to do this one is basically just a summary book chapter of a couple off of two signed papers and a couple of other publications so you can also read the science paper if you wanted actually good exercise go and read the science paper it's actually pretty cool and often these are easy easy to understand this one should be understandable for you and the point now is that this is an example about how when individuals behave in a certain way how that then leads to a certain macro level phenomenon this case we are talking about inequality in unpredictability okay let's backtrack a little bit what we do observe in cultural markets no cultural markers I don't know it's books movies music these kind of things that's how it could be referred with cultural markets but what we do observe often is that things are really difficult to predict what's going to be successful or a lot so you all know the Harry Potter books no usually successful most successful books ever you know but I actually took I think eight publishing houses who rejected the book in the first instance they didn't want to publish it they thought oh that's it's never going to fly or these young visions and stars and richness and who wants to read that so of course in retrospect those publishing houses they were pretty upset about having having passed the opportunity but it tells us something about hang on actually we was really difficult to predict the success in in cultural markets so it actually was seven publishing houses that rejected the series originally but then at the end of the day or sold click to be over three hundred million times actually so keep going and I don't know all the editions we see another example that you might be familiar with so the Star Wars now it's hugely successful franchises like whoa multi-billion dollars business at the moment yeah but again at the beginning people thought ah this is this is this is a fail it's not going to work it almost it almost didn't get produced it's you know it's just I don't know a couple of individuals believed in it but actually the East we thought at the time at the time there were no big Star Wars universe space movies and science fiction and a white know people thought ah this is not going to fly you just think you waste your money on it's turned out to be a huge success actually sometimes you see the opposite and that's not what we hear noise me you know I like this I like these marble movies and stuff like that DC universe and yeah but then you see once in a while that was move really sweet 16 god guys you ruined it yeah I know I barely walk out of a movie but having smooth the Batman vs Superman I have to have now I had to go this is just drawn it for me it's like one of the most two of the best franchises that I loved up to that moment they just dumped it yeah and any wonder they they spend millions hundreds of millions of dollars on producing movies like that and there are other movies that are examples for that where huge amount of money just goes down the drain yeah there are lots of examples and when you talk with folks in the movie industry they say well to be honest we don't know what's going to in successful it's like a guessing game it's really like Ivan really dies a little bit it's really really hot in retrospect of course you can always come up with stories but at that moment it's really really hard hotel or another example I don't know you might remember this show American Idol it's like a huge success all over the world by now it luckily died out God finally but but that show also has been has been has been rejected by three television stations and then it was like a moneymaker for 15 years afterwards for the for the TV stations are finally adopted so long story short things are incredibly incredibly difficult Dick's in cultural cultural markets and now this paper that I'm talking about actually has an answer for that it says the reason for that is because of social influence social influence happens at the micro level people are influenced by others and that leads to a macro level phenomenon which is first inequality we'll talk about that in a second but then also about unpredictability it's really hard to make predictions about that how can that be okay so now let's talk about the music let's start by psionic Peter dots and Duncan Watts pioneers in their fields was very normative what they did at the time you know dislike the mid-2000s basically what they did nowadays it's hard to imagine you know about back in the days there was there was no Spotify or anything like that there was hardly an iTunes something like that so what they did they created a website where people could go to and listen listen for free to some music was a music of unknown artists then they could rate the song they keep it a score something new now to thumbs-up thumbs-down I don't know five five stars zero stars yeah it's Paul from zero to hundred whatnot and then people could download the song for free and they had this website and it's like like a like a milestone also in terms of that they actually pulled off such a large social experiment and we can use experiments to study society and I think they become very powerful when you do that we can use experiments not just to study individual behavior but to study collective outcomes and that's what we do so they controlled the information that the participants would receive for the behaviors and the you know and the download of other people now you see the blueprint offer of an experimental design there's always the same you have like something that is like the control condition people went to this website they listened to the song to music that they could download they could see it there there was R&R I think there are a hundred and 50 songs there that people could listen they carefully selected them from unknown artists so that nobody would know them and then people to rate yeah so far so good give the song a score and now the experimental condition comes into play so we have like a control group and then we have a treatment group where we administer a treatment what does that mean that means we do something and then we know the difference between these two groups must be because of what we did to this one group but we didn't do it to the other that's what we call the treatment condition where something is being done to those guys but not to the others and then you see a difference between these two and then it's actually it's pretty cool because this is like the gold standard of getting towards causality that's alright how we can get to knowing what is actually causing what right because if then there is a difference the difference must be assuring that otherwise people are assigned at random then we the difference must be due to what we did to the people in the control group let me didn't do the people in the control to the people in the treatment condition but we didn't do it to the people in the control condition what was the treatment here well the treatment was social influence they kind of told people about the readings of other people so imagine that half of the people went to this website and they just saw those songs listen to it and gave it a rating but the other half of people went to the same website but instead of chefs singing the songs they actually also saw the readings that other people gave to that song that's the treatment condition and they did that they did another nice thing and that's where unpredictability comes into play they didn't just funnel people off into one control in one treatment condition but they actually funneled people off into eight different treatment conditions it was exactly the same treatment but they only saw the information about the other people that lived in that world yeah so that's actually how it looked at so actually people will split up you know half of them were just directly sent to the control group and the other half they were split up into one of those other eight groups and in these other groups they all got the information about the people that were in that particular group now the readings that people gave in that particular that's a design and now we have two experiments that they conducted in that but first one is what they call I don't know the weak influenced condition and the second one is strongly influenced condition they they distinguish the difference between these two is that in the week one they basically imagine you went to this website and there was a random order of the songs but there was the number the ratings of the songs after visible at the end of that song but there was no sorting of those songs while in the strong influence condition not only was where the readings of other people visible but those songs were also ordered according to that it's like I don't know the highest-rated song was at the top why the lowest rating song was at the board it's just an other in both in both cases there's information about others conveyed but in the strong influence condition it made very prevalent made sure okay well actually it's really at the top here yeah you you get the message other people really liked that song so what were the findings so now I'm going to talk you through their findings well first of all you see now different graphs for that you see ranked market share and the probability for listening and what you see is different thoughts why thoughts are the independent it's like control condition like people that didn't have any information about others and you see the grey dots these are individuals or actually in this case refer to the songs where people have information about others how others liked that song and what you see is that in the sort of inference condition songs that were ranked higher will also listen more right so once you kind of got for exactly the same song once you kind of had the information others liked that song you were more likely to listen to that song that's what this graph here shows just really shows that if we would not have given that information people would have the chances for listening to a song would have been the same pretty much okay so that's the first one but now we're actually interested in these two macro level are cops right I mentioned inequality and unpredictability okay let's get to that so the first one they argue and that's a quite a contribution saying that so inference leads to inequality what is inequality while inequality is really about how unequally distributed a certain thing it's could be all sorts of things it could be well it could be intelligence it could be I don't know likes it could be whatever it's really inequality does not exist if you all have the same number equality does exist if you all have different done now why shouldn't exist if in them they're different ways of measuring that and now the Gini coefficient is the most popular way of measuring inequality it's a measure for forgetting that inequality when everybody has the same everybody says that's a we would we would get all scores from 0 to 100 if it would all get the score 50 the Gini coefficient would be zero now I'm the right-hand side you see a graph about how you calculate now is about the cumulative distribution you just add out all the values and she's line people up right and and kind of stack them on the top of each other that's the community community of share of people with I don't know in this case with income is yeah so you should stack them on the top of each other and if everybody is the same that kind of stacking up should follow a one line I dragon oh that means everybody has the same value on whatever that is so if you would all have to score 50 then the distribution would follow that line and the Gini coefficient would be zero while a contrast the Gini coefficient is one key cheaper rates from zero to one if let's now a little example with scores from zero to a hundred if all of you would have a score of zero and one person is score of 100 now then the cumulative distribution would be nothing happens nothing happens nothing happened nothing happens until the last person shows up and then it kind of we go up in the cumulative distribution and then you will basically cover cover this whole area then this what is called the Lorenz curve would be like really going down and then going up and you know the Gini coefficient is defined graphically a little bit as the area that Lorenz curve covers of the whole thing yeah but it's about too much about that it's really just a matter of how unequal anticipated are things it's zero when everybody is the same it's one when one person really sticks out okay so now they cannot use this measure with these so now you see these eight different worlds so you see like eight dark gray bars they represent these eight different worlds in the sort of inference condition and they have one light gray bar that it's the one world in the control condition it's all about a control condition first basically there they take the each score each of those hundred songs on 50 songs I I know how many they were got a ready and and if people would have would have given all the the same reading to the to the same songs that Gini coefficient would have been zero while if one song would have been like the top song and huge amount of points and everybody else would have gotten zero at one point this Gini coefficient would have been one now that's other now but it's depicted on the y-axis what you see over there and the story here now it's when you compare particularly on the strong influence convention experiment the second experiment at the bottom you see this difference between the social influence group and the independent group so when people could hear about what others liked they started jumping on that who they also go up not points to those who already got lots of points and that kind of increases the variable the variance between everybody that's the point are you we have a whole other lecture about that it's called success bit success or the Matthew effect that those who are already successful they become even more successful sometimes also calling cumulative advantage in in sociology and that mechanism leads to these two an inequality in the points and that number one song because it's number one lots of other people listen to it and because other people listen to it they are more likely to make it a move on as well compared to the scenario where that song would not have been more likely to be listened to so that's sort of how household influence leads to inequality of the macro level okay so that's one thing the second thing that they have or the second maxillary implications of speed is that social influence leads to unpredictability unpredictability and yeah they're not making these things up but they actually have solid evidence for that so don't forget about the equations here you know it's a we just put it up there when you guys those who actually do want to understand it but the story is really really simple you know they have these eight different worlds right I said Jesus designed that it didn't just funnel people into one sort of influence world but in eight different was yeah and there was no information across those growth but really only just information within those worlds now the idea with unpredictability is that I don't know if social influence actually matters here and then give up these dynamics that kick something off and then one song becomes more successful and so on and so forth and it's actually a pretty random process how this occurs sometimes just random differences and sometimes actually no real differences make one sound popular and then because of that bang that that guy Skylar that's right if you kind of take that idea and kind of think this maybe there's nothing fundamental about these songs maybe it's really about the dynamics that matter here then it could have been equally another song let's have ad skyrockets off if the world could have been somehow different somehow I don't know somebody else would have ranked wants on a high to begin with then that song would have been the number one while in another world in another life it could have been another song that takes it off that's scary to think about because often it's astrology we don't like this idea that randomness drives things but I think it's fascinating randomness is most often I don't know much as the problem but the solution to our problems in a Y or in societal context they can explain so much yeah it's like really fascinating and I don't know much more research needs to be done in that regard and what they did they applied that idea to those eight different worlds and that they have this measure and you see his measure on this one's like essentially what this is this that this measure is high when when songs got very different ratings across those eight different worlds right if it would be all about the subjective quality or I know objective quality of a song then I know that song is good it should be good in all of those worlds if a song is bad it should be bad in all of those worlds right but actually that's exactly what they measure you and this unpredictability is high when the difference across those words in the readings or a song is high that means people don't agree over those different words what is the best and what is the worst song how does the story right maybe they did the same thing for our independent originally she actually paid attention to this so far and she either missing that today as well they only have like one world where they're the people were in the independent conditions but none of them is connected to anybody right so actually when you read the science paper they're described a little more that they split people in half they create two artificial worlds nobody talked with each other and they applied the same algorithm the same formula that you have here to make like how do people in these artificially created halves agree on the rating on a song now we are ready to interpret this graph though because now what you see is that in our in our control conditions like independence this unpredictability score is lower compared to in the sort of inference condition where people hear about what others like so basically when people hear about what others like and how others read it it didn't just cause these dynamics unfolding but actually in these eight different worlds where history could have played out in a very different way it actually need to do two disagreement people didn't agree on what is like this song that's kind of a sign for actually not really about the objective quality of those songs but it is about the underlying dynamics that play out here and then we are talking about so difference so that's essentially how social influence can lead to to know chance to inequality but also to unpredictability so these are the two findings of this study you know that hearing about others and in the context of the macro level schema you see how individuals behave in a certain way but that kind of is not just aggregated in a way because people in France each other it transforms and we have macro level phenomena like inequality and unpredicted unpredictability summarize it you know they showed that social influence at the micro level leads to both inequality and unpredictability at the Trula huh but we have we come back to this study when we talk about Matthew effect success pizzas excellent because they actually did really cool stuff as well where then where they artificially changed those ratings and so the people waited in some very high but then they kind of made a cut and kind of read it the worst rating and actually then what happens is then actually the next people also made it worse even though other people kind of rated it out so that's another but that's a story for another day so on Thursday we'll talk first about self-fulfilling prophecies and for that you have the reading by merchants and all the readings including this reading is relevant or the take compass yeah see your own person