 "If you like it, I like it: Researchers show how herd mentality works online")
Ever had a feeling that a lot of your friends were suddenly talking about this hilarious article you first shared last week? You’re probably right in thinking that they probably liked the article after you liked and shared it. Researchers have confirmed that if you “like” an article on Facebook, even if it’s not all that great, it is bound to be approved of.
MIT Professor Sinan Aral and a team of researchers have written in Science magazine that a ’like’ or ‘share’ can set off a series of approvals towards the article. It’s a kind of a domino effect where your ’like’ can make several other people like and share the same piece.
If you like it so do I, but if you dislike it, I will tell you why I like it
Surprisingly, in the course of the experiment it was discovered that the same does not work for negative reactions. If you dislike an article or post, in all probability you will be countered with positive aspects of it by your detractors.
Aral and his researchers created this experiment to test how much a single positive or negative review can sway the opinion of a group of online commenters. The study, Aral says, was done using a news aggregator site “similar to Reddit”, but refused to specify which one it really was. The experiment went on for a period of five months and over 100,000 posts. The researchers used the “no vote” as a control and gave an upvote or downvote as the first comment, completely at random. There was a control group for which comments were not manipulated.
It was discovered that articles that got an upvote were 32 percent more likely to receive positive ratings. Over time, the comments with upvotes ended with scores 25 percent higher than those in the control group. Posts with downvotes on the other hand came up with scores indistinguishable from the control group.
So now the next time you want to others to like a particular story, you know how to do it.
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