Trône de Fer. Web comics. Jeux web. Wargames. Clive Thompson on How Group Think Rules What We Like. Illustration: Kelly Blair Can you persuade someone to like a product by telling them that it’s popular?
Do teenagers like Taylor Swift because she’s good or because everyone else they know likes her — so hey, she must be good, right? Sociologist Robert Merton dubbed this tendency to base what we think we think on what other people are doing the “self-fulfilling prophecy” in 1949, and since then social scientists have tried to measure how powerful it actually is. Now, based on some studies conducted with the help of the Internet, it seems clear that we’re often just sheep. A few years ago, Duncan Watts — a network-theory pioneer and scientist at Yahoo and Columbia University — wanted to test the strength of self-fulfilling prophecies in pop culture.
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