Leading the Herd Astray: My Experiment in Social Media

I got turned on to herd behavior experiments by a radio broadcast in Late January / Early February 2014.  There is a group of scientists who studies Influence.  One approach is to create parallel worlds containing the same 48 songs.  In some worlds, a few (or one) song(s) begin with an advantage.  In other worlds, songs all begin with the same rating and receive an artificial "boost" partway through the experiment.  In one "control" world, all songs begin with the same rating and the 12,207 participants are allowed to choose at will without any outside influence.  The popularity of songs were determined in part by a “cumulative advantage” process where early success led to future success.  The popularity ordering of the songs was measured by (free) download counts.  This study simulates something like the scenario below:

Say Lady Gaga has better quality music then her competitors, therefore her popularity was earned through sheer recognition of her quality
(or)
Lady Gaga would have just sounded like any other pop-star if not that she signed with the right record label at the right time in the right place, thus getting lucky and the popularity followed those beneficial setting.

The results of the study by Salganik and Watts showed that promoted songs became the winners in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.  I am happy to be learning about this phenomenon by immersion in such a social media experiment now, the Chemistry Champions contest.  Unfortunately I have dropped from #16 to #19, and based on herd mentality, I believe that means my ship is sinking.  If you have 3 minutes to spare, please watch the following video.  Help boost me back into the top 10 for a chance to travel to a national meeting and receive special training in science communication!


References

Stopezynski, et al. Measuring large-scale social networks with high resolution. PLOS ONE (2014). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0095978 http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0095978

Muchnik, et al.Social Influence Bias: A Randomized Experiment. Science 341, 647 (2013). DOI: 10.1126/science.1240466 http://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/muchnik13bias.pdf

Salganik and Watts. Leading the Herd Astray: An Experimental Study of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in an Artificial Cultural Market. (2013) Soc Psychol Q. 2008 ; 74(4): 338–. DOI: 10.1177/019027250807100404. www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_watts08.pdf

https://americasos.wordpress.com/tag/social-experiment/ 

http://freakonomics.com/2012/06/21/riding-the-herd-mentality-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/