Interesting research this week.
The Effect of Audience Size
We all know that people follow crowds. This is why there are theories such as the Herd Effect and FOMO etc. But this latest research looks at whether the reason for a crowd forming affects the influence of the crowd. People might assume that a long queue of customers outside a store means the product is good quality. But what if the queue is partly motivated by a desire to shelter from rain? This paper shows that when people deliberate on potential reasons for the crowd forming, the tendency to follow the crowd decreases.
https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.70022
Algorithmic Recommendations
When browsing ecommerce websites, customers are often recommended to purchase specific products – either because the seller has chosen to promote it, or because an algorithm has identified the relevance of the product to that customer. This study compared recommendations made by the seller, with those made either algorithmically or by influencers. Surprisingly (to me), messages generated by the seller are more trustworthy and more likely to drive purchase intention than influencers. Perhaps most interestingly though, messages generated algorithmically also lead to purchase intention, showing the benefits of such data-led recommendations.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2025.108735
Photo by Adam Nowakowski on Unsplash
