science

Social influence bias

Social influence bias is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Social influence bias rather than just read about it. In short: The social influence bias is an asymmetric herding effect on online social media platforms that makes users overcompensate for negative ratings but amplify positive ones. Driven by the desire to be accepted within a specific group, it surrounds the idea that people alter certain behaviors to be like those of the people within a group.

Key takeaways

Social influence bias belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Social influence bias to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Social influence bias from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The social influence bias is an asymmetric herding effect on online social media platforms that makes users overcompensate for negative ratings but amplify positive ones. Driven by the desire to be accepted within a specific group, it surrounds the idea that people alter certain behaviors to be like those of the people within a group. Therefore, it is a subgroup term for various types of cognitive biases. Some social influence bias types include the bandwagon effect, authority bias, groupthinking effect, social comparison bias, social media bias and more. Understanding these biases helps us understand the term overall. However, the composition of the term "social influence bias" requires critical examination to understand the way that it affects individuals' and groups' lives. The term "influence" has 2 different types of stigma. For one, it surrounds the idea that people show their true inner selves when "under the influence". On the other end, it also proposes the idea that people are not their own selves when "under the influence". These tend to be constructions made by people, which also tend to fit the situation based on their own perspectives. So, even in social terms, it requires both sides to be examined to understand whether we truly are affected by context, or we remain to be and behave in terms of our own selves. The term "influence" doesn't necessarily say that there lies greater strength in our inner selves' desires and decisions, nor does it say that external factors have the greater power. In a similar manner, both social and non-social judgments are to be associated with anxiety, but the same can't necessarily be said in the case of social conformity. So, the gray areas within this topic beg the question, "What does social influence bias say about us, and does it affect us all in the same way?"

Social media bias

Media bias is reflected in search systems in social media. Kulshrestha and her team found through research in 2018 that the top-ranked results returned by these search engines can influence users' perceptions when they conduct searches for events or people, which is particularly reflected in political bias and polarizing topics. Fueled by confirmation bias, online echo chambers allow users to be steeped within their own ideology. Because social media is tailored to your interests and your selected friends, it is an easy outlet for political echo chambers. Social media bias is also reflected in hostile media effect. Social media has a place in disseminating news in modern society, where viewers are exposed to other people's comments while reading news articles. In their 2020 study, Gearhart and her team showed that viewers' perceptions of bias increased and perceptions of credibility decreased after seeing comments with which they held different opinions.

In research context In observational data, how social influence affects collected judgment is challenging to fully understand. Positive social influence can accumulate and result in a rating bubble, while negative social influence is neutralized by crowd correction. This phenomenon was first described in a paper written by Lev Muchnik, Sinan Aral and Sean J. Taylor in 2014, then the question was revisited by Cicognani et al., whose experiment reinforced Munchnik's and his co-authors' results.

Relevance Online customer reviews are trusted sources of information in various contexts such as online marketplaces, dining, accommodation, movies, or digital products. However, these online ratings are not immune to herd behavior, which means that subsequent reviews are not independent from each other. As on many such sites, preceding opinions are visible to a new reviewer; he or she can be heavily influenced by the antecedent evaluations in his or her decision about a certain product, service or online content. This form of herding behavior inspired Muchnik, Aral and Taylor to conduct their experiment on influence in social contexts.

Experimental design Muchnik, Aral, and Taylor designed a large-scale randomized experiment to measure social influence on user reviews. The experiment was conducted on social news aggregation websites like Reddit. The study lasted for 5 months; the authors randomly assigned 101 281 comments to one of the following treatment groups: up-treated (4049), down-treated (1942), or control (the proportions reflect the observed ratio of up-and down-votes. Comments that fell into the first group were given an upvote upon the creation of the comment; the second group got a downvote upon creation; the comments in the control group remained untouched. A vote is equivalent to a single rating (+1 or -1). As other users are unable to trace a user's votes, they were unaware of the experiment. Due to randomization, comments in the control and the treatment group were not different in terms of expected rating. The treated comments were viewed more than 10 million times and rated 308 515 times by successive users.

Results

The up-vote treatment increased the probability of up-voting by the first viewer by 32% over the control group, while the probability of down-voting did not change compared to the control group, which means that users did not correct the random positive rating. The upward bias remained in place for the observed 5-month period. The accumulating herding effect increased the comments' mean rating by 25% compared to the control group comments. Positively manipulated comments did receive higher ratings at all parts of the distribution, which means that they were also more likely to collect extremely high scores. The negative manipulation created an asymmetric herd effect: although the probability of subsequent down-votes was increased by the negative treatment, the probability of up-voting also grew for these comments. The community performed a correction which neutralized the negative treatment and resulted in non-different final mean ratings from the control group. The authors also compared the final mean scores of comments across the most active topic categories on the website. The observed positive herding effect was present in the "politics," "culture and society," and "business" subreddits, but was not applicable for "economics," "IT," "fun," and "general news".-

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Social influence bias

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Social influence bias claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Social influence bias before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Social influence bias ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Social influence bias

In research: Social influence bias appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Social influence bias in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Social influence bias is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Cognitive biases, Crowd psychology, Social influence, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Social influence bias outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Social influence bias in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Social influence bias means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Social influence bias out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Social influence bias in simple terms?

Why does Social influence bias matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Social influence bias?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Social influence bias.