Why Would Abercrombie & Fitch Pay Someone NOT to Wear Its Apparel?

When we think about social influence, we typically think about how and why people tend to feel pressures to conform to the behavior of their peers, colleagues, or teammates. We act a certain way, or make certain decisions, because others have made similar choices or taken similar actions. However, at times, social influence works in the opposite way. We do not want to be like certain people. Therefore, if they act a certain way, we most certainly do not want to behave in a similar fashion. 

Jonah Berger, author of Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior, relates a story about this type of repellent effect of social influence in an episode of the Hidden Brain podcast.   Berger tells a story from the reality show, Jersey Shore, believe it or not!  He explains that Abercrombie & Fitch once paid Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino NOT to wear its apparel.   Similarly, a Gucci competitor sent Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi one of Gucci's handbags.  Why would that Gucci rival do that?  They knew that many luxury handbag customers would be turned off by the fact that Snooki was carrying around a Gucci handbag.  That would hurt the Gucci brand image, and perhaps help the rival's position in the market.   

Berger explained ,"It turns out influence is very much like a magnet...but it just as well repels us.  And the idea here is, well, if Mike 'The Situation' is wearing Abercrombie & Fitch, maybe other people aren't going to want to wear it anymore. Or if Snooki is hanging on to a Gucci handbag, maybe that will help their competitors because no one will want to wear Gucci anymore. So we need to understand how social influence attracts, but also how it repels."

Berger once conducted a study with Stanford's Chip Heath to demonstrate the power of this repellent effect.  Berger and Heath distributed Livestrong wristbands to residents of a particular dorm on the Stanford campus.  One week later, they distributed the wristbands to a nearby residence hall known on the campus as the "geeky" dorm.   The researchers tracked continued usage of the wristbands.  They found a 32% drop in wristband usage by the first group.  They had witnessed the "geeks" wearing the Livestrong wristbands, and a sizeable number of them had abandoned wearing them as a result!  

Why A Few Box Office Hits Generate More Revenue Than Ever

The Wall Street Journal reports today on some interesting trends in the movie business.   According to this article by Ben Fritz, a small number of blockbuster hits accounts for a higher fraction of total box office receipts than in past years.   This year, the hits have included movies such as Finding Dory and Zootopia.  Fritz writes, "Increasingly, success in the movie business requires being one of the handful of most popular movies that draw a disproportionate amount of attention on social media and in the cultural zeitgeist. This year’s five most popular films account for 30% of the total domestic box office. At the end of last year that figure was 22%, a record at the time. The inevitable result is a smaller pool of moviegoers left to see everything else."  

Why the shift toward a larger share of revenue from the top movies of the year?   Fritz wrote an earlier column that may offer some clues.  In that piece, he noted that viewers tend to be getting their information from different sources these days.  In the past, people watched Siskel and Ebert (and others like them), and those experts shaped their movie-going decisions.  Today, people pay much more attention to what other viewers think.   What is the movie's Rotten Tomatoes score?  A bad score can doom a movie.   

Is this shift an example of the power of the wisdom of crowds?  Is it necessarily a good thing that we are using the crowd's wisdom to guide our movie-going decisions?   Interestingly, some research points to the pitfalls of the wisdom of crowds.  Jan Lorenz, Heiko Rauhut, Frank Schweitzer, and 

Dirk Helbing have studied this issue through experimental research.  They summarize their findings in the excerpt below:  

This wisdom of crowd effect was recently supported by examples from stock markets, political elections, and quiz shows [Surowiecki J (2004)The Wisdom of Crowds]. In contrast, we demonstrate by experimental evidence (N = 144) that even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect in simple estimation tasks. In the experiment, subjects could reconsider their response to factual questions after having received average or full information of the responses of other subjects. We compare subjects’ convergence of estimates and improvements in accuracy over five consecutive estimation periods with a control condition, in which no information about others’ responses was provided. Although groups are initially “wise,” knowledge about estimates of others narrows the diversity of opinions to such an extent that it undermines the wisdom of crowd effect in three different ways.

Interestingly, one other shift seems to be occurring in Hollywood from the production standpoint. More than ever, studios appear to be relying on franchises, sequels, and reboots.   Why is that happening?   One could argue that the studios are trying to enhance the probability of achieving a strong box office by bringing familiar characters to the screen.  That may be true to some extent, but there may be a limit to this positive impact.  At some point, they may saturate theaters with reboots and sequels, and customers may desire more originality.   

Jonah Berger on Social Influence

Building on the recent blog post about social influence, here's Jonah Berger himself talking about his research.

Video on Social Influence: Mob Rules

Building on the last blog post, check out this National Geographic video about social influence.

When Do Others Help Us Make Better Decisions, and When Does the Influence of Others Hurt Us?

Jonah Berger of Wharton has written a new book titled, Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior.   He was recently interviewed for an article on the Knowledge@Wharton website.   In that interview, he discusses how the presence and influence of others sometimes helps us, and on other occasions, can have a detrimental impact.   Here's an excerpt from that interview:  

There’s this wonderful old study on motivation. This researcher was interested in just the question you were interested in. He looked at a bunch of research and said, “Well, sometimes others seem to be motivating. They lead us to work harder, do better. Sometimes they lead us to get demotivated, do worse. Why is that? What are situations that lead to one versus the other?”

He wanted to figure out a way to test that. He designed this amazing experiment with running, looking at how running was affected by other individuals watching you run. But he didn’t do it with people. He did it with cockroaches. He built this cockroach stadium, where these little cockroaches would run cockroach races — run from one stadium side to the other. But then he could manipulate whether other cockroaches are watching them…. He’s interested in, “Well, how does the mere presence of others affect what we do?”

He had them run one of two mazes. One that was either straight ahead, just really easy, or one where you had to run straight and then make a left turn, really difficult — “Do I go right? Do I go left? What do I do?” What he found is, when the task was easy, when it was well-learned, running straight — something cockroaches know how to do well — having others around helped them do better. They ran faster with others than they did by themselves. But when it was a difficult task, when they had to figure out, “Do I go left or do I go right?” Then it was more complicated. The mere presence of others actually made them do worse.  

As you mentioned, parallel parking. If we know how to do things well, if they are easy things we’ve already done a bunch, then having others around makes us do them better. If you’re great at shooting pool, for example, shooting pool with someone else will actually make you better at shooting pool than by yourself.

But if you’re not so good at shooting pool, if it’s something that you’re not used to doing, if it’s difficult for you, then having others around can make you do worse. Parallel parking, for example, maybe some of us are good at it. But most of us tend to be a little bit nervous to begin with. We’re not excellent parallel parkers. Merely having someone else in the car can make it more difficult for us. It makes us more nervous, more anxious. While that anxiety can help us do better when it’s easy for us to do those tasks, they can lead us to do worse when it’s a difficult or complicated task.

Think Like A Freak

Last week, I finished reading Think Like a Freak, the third installment in the series of "Freakonomics" books by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.   I enjoyed the book a great deal.  One of my favorite parts features a description of a study conducted by Robert Cialdini, one of the foremost scholars in the area of persuasion and social influence.   

Cialdini and his colleagues conducted a phone survey in California regarding the reasons why people wished to engage in energy conservation.    The researchers listed four potential reasons:

1.  It saves money (the financial motive)

2.  It protects the environment (the moral motive)

3.  It benefits society (the social motive)

4.  A lot of other people are trying to do it (the herd-mentality motive)

The survey results demonstrated that the moral motive (#2) was ranked highest by Californians.  The herd mentality motive ranked dead last.  We should not be surprised by those findings.

Then Cialdini's study examined what people actually did.   Did they act in accordance with their stated beliefs, or did they say one thing while doing another?   The researchers explored this question through an ingenious study.  They hung placards on the houses of citizens.  The placards came in five different versions - one placard for each motive listed above, and one generic placard.   Then the scholars measured and evaluated the actual energy usage in each home.  Who conserved the most energy?  The citizens who had received placards emphasizing the herd-mentality motive.  Their placard read "Join Your Neighbors."   

Why do I highlight this study?   Many people claim that social influence does not affect their actions. We think we are independent-minded.  However, our actions show that we are not so independent; we are influenced a great deal by others' words and actions.   Becoming better independent thinkers begins with recognizing the impact that social influence processes actually have on us. 

Wisdom of Crowds vs. Herd Behavior

The Wall Street Journal reports this morning about a new study by scholars Lev Muchnik, Sinan Aral, and Sean Taylor.  The researchers examined, "positive online ratings can be strongly influenced by favorable ratings that have come before."  They found that initial positive ratings did create herd behavior.  Ratings that followed were more likely to be positive as a result of the influence of the initial evaluations.  However, initial negative ratings did not lead to similar herd behavior.  

What's the lesson here?  First, the wisdom of crowds depends upon the notion that each individual is making an independent judgment.  Unfortunately, human beings are subject to social influence.  We aren't as independent-minded as we would like to believe.  Second, social influence doesn't just affect us when we are in a group having a discussion.  It can affect us in virtual settings as well.   Third, social influence does not just affect us when we know the other people involved.  An anonymous individual can exhibit influence over us, as is the case in this study.   Well, those conclusions paint a rather bleak picture, don't they?  We have to be aware of the power of social influence, and we cannot pretend that we are somehow immune to such bias.  Herding behavior is everywhere. 

Using Social Influence For Some Good

Consider the following three signs posted in hotel bathrooms (from a study by UCLA Professor Noah Goldstein and his co-authors):

HELP SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT

The environment deserves our respect.  You can show your respect for nature and help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay. 

JOIN YOUR FELLOW GUESTS IN HELPING TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT

Almost 75% of the guests who are asked to participate in our new resource savings program do help by using their towels more than once.  You can join your fellow guests in this program to help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.

JOIN YOUR FELLOW GUESTS IN HELPING TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT

In a study conducted in Fall 2003, 75% of the guests who stayed in this room (#xxx) participated in your new resource savings program by using towels more than once.  You can join your fellow guests in this program to help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.

Does the hotel guests' behavior change as a result of these changes in the language on these bathroom signs?  It sure does!   With the first sign posted above, 35% of guests chose to reuse their towels.   With the second sign, the participation increased to 44%.  Finally, the third sign increased reuse rates to 49.3%.   

What's going on here?   We are affected by the behavior of others - no surprise there.  We are more affected by "people like us" than by others with whom we do not feel a common bond.  Francesca Gino explains the research on this topic in her new book (Sidetracked: How our decisions get derailed, and how we can stick to the plan).  What's amazing about the example above is that the common bond created in the third experimental condition is simply that others stayed in the same hotel  room as the individual reading the sign about re-using towels.   The others are complete strangers!  Yet, the fact that they stayed in the same room creates just enough of a bond to nudge up the rate at which guests reuse towels.   Common bonds and social influence, of course, can also affect us in negative ways.   In this case, though, the researchers showed how we can use influence processes for some good. 

Wisdom and Foolishness of Crowds

Jonah Lehrer had a nice column in the weekend Wall Street Journal about the "wisdom of crowds" - the notion that we can get the right answers to tough problems by marshaling the collective intellect from a large group of people through a mechanism such as a voting process. Lehrer points to a study by Swiss scholars that suggests that crowds may not always be so smart.   Lehrer writes:


The experiment was straightforward. The researchers gathered 144 Swiss college students, sat them in isolated cubicles, and then asked them to answer various questions, such as the number of new immigrants living in Zurich. In many instances, the crowd proved correct. When asked about those immigrants, for instance, the median guess of the students was 10,000. The answer was 10,067.
The scientists then gave their subjects access to the guesses of the other members of the group. As a result, they were able to adjust their subsequent estimates based on the feedback of the crowd. The results were depressing. All of a sudden, the range of guesses dramatically narrowed; people were mindlessly imitating each other. Instead of canceling out their errors, they ended up magnifying their biases, which is why each round led to worse guesses. Although these subjects were far more confident that they were right—it's reassuring to know what other people think—this confidence was misplaced.

The results do not surprise at all.  The key to the wisdom of crowds, as James Suroweicki explained in his great book on the phenomenon, is that individuals must make independent judgments.   In a voting process, where individuals do not interact prior to rendering their judgment, we have independence.  However, in group and organization settings, social influence often plays a powerful role.   People are affected and even swayed by the judgments of others, and that often has a negative effect on the "wisdom" of the crowd.  I've always highlighted this fact by asking people whether they think the audience's accuracy on the game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire would go up or down if people had time to sit in a conference room and deliberate about the particular trivia question.   Because of social influence, I have always argued that accuracy would likely fall.  This simple experiment reinforces that conclusion.