Informational Social Influence: Exploiting Collective Bubbles on the Web

Informational social influence describes a phenomenon in which someone assumes that the actions of other people amount to a "correct behavior" in specific situations. It is a classic response to a lack of information and, although it has a rational component, its effects lead large groups to close themselves off or settle for certain decisions or opinions, regardless of their validity or the amount of data behind them. If this rings a bell in the era of social media and fake news, you're not wrong...

A word that has become very popular is "influencer". In its most common version, the influencer adopts a profile of a potential consumer, exploring the good and bad of a product. However, under the dynamics of social media, this influencer can become an "authoritative voice" simply by having thousands of followers who support them and everything they do or say is judged based on that detail. Another interesting case is that of e-sports players. Once they talk about the hardware they use when training and playing, their fans reproduce that recommendation and apply it without exploring alternatives or considering the possibility that it might not be the best for them.

Informational Social Influence: "The Wisdom of the Crowd"

If someone sees this "from the outside", lacking additional data, they might conclude that the recommendation is appropriate and valid because the popularity of the athlete/influencer and their raw follower count convey a supposed sense of trust. However, it is nothing more than informational social influence: in ambiguous situations, a person unable to identify appropriate behavior will be led by the people around them, based on the assumption that they have more and better information.

Informational social influence forces us to assimilate similar concepts like herd behavior (or gregarious behavior), the argumentum ad populum fallacy ("if many believe it, then it's true"), and the always important confirmation bias, under which people favor information that confirms their ideas, visions, and hypotheses, even to the point of ignoring its falsity. The impressive advance of informational social influence demands that we be able to identify it, because there are many elements out there (crowdfunding, political campaigns, etc.) that use it to try to create a "correct behavior" and modify our actions.