The Influence of Collective Opinion on True-False Judgment and Information-Sharing Decision

The Influence of Collective Opinion on True-False Judgment and Information-Sharing Decision Huaye Li (hli21@stevens.edu) Yasuaki Sakamoto (ysakamot@stevens.edu) Howe School of Technology Management, Stevens Institute of Technology Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA Abstract The purpose of the current work is to examine when and how knowing collective opinion influences people’s judgments and decisions in social media environments. In particular, the present work focuses on people’s true-false judgment of statements found on websites and the likelihood of sharing these statements. The results from Experiment 1 revealed that, for false statements, collective opinion had little influence on people’s true-false judgments, but, for true and debatable statements, their judgments were biased toward collective opinion. The results from Experiment 2 indicated that the likelihood of sharing the true, debatable, and false statements followed the collective opinion, and that people were less likely to share false statements than debatable or true ones without collective opinion. These findings extend past work on social influence and advance understanding of how people make judgments and decisions in social media websites. Keywords: Collective opinion, true-false judgment, information-sharing decision, social media, social influence Introduction Social media technologies, such as Twitter and Facebook, have become part of many people’s everyday lives. Using these technologies, people not only acquire new information but also generate content and influence trends. Given the growing use and participatory nature of social media, better understanding of how people behave in such an environment is essential. The objective of the current paper is to contribute to this need by reporting the results from two experiments that examine how people make true-false judgments on statements found on websites and how they make decisions about whether or not to share these statements in a social media environment. In the current work, sharing of a statement means passing of the statement to others. In particular, the work presented here focuses on how social influence plays a role in people’s true-false judgments and sharing decisions in a social media context. Collective Opinion One of the main functions of social media is to share opinions with others and collectively make decisions (e.g., Glushko et al., 2008). Collective opinion, such as how many people have liked or shared a message, is part of social media technologies. In Twitter, an example of collective opinion is the number of re-tweets, or the number of people who re-tweeted a particular message. Re-tweeting is a kind of sharing, in which an original tweet, a brief message of 140 characters or less, is broadcast to the re-tweeter’s followers through a simple clicking of a re-tweet button. The re-tweeted messages become available to the public as well, and the number of re-tweets associated with a tweet signifies the popularity of the tweet. The more ret-tweets, the more popular. Facebook uses ‘like’ to indicate the popularity of photos, stories, communities, and so on. Many review websites allow users to indicate their opinion about the usefulness of a particular review. Despite the abundance of collective opinion in social media websites, when and how it affects people’s judgments and decisions in such an environment is not well understood. However, there are classic studies on social influence in face-to-face environments, and more recent work on social influence in online environments, whose findings indicate that people use collective opinion to make their judgments and decisions in various situations. Social Influence Past research in face-to-face environments has shown that people have a strong motivation to compare their opinions with others (Festinger, 1954), and they often adopt the decisions of others (e.g., Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004; Deutsch & Gerard, 1995; Gureckis & Goldstone, 2006) due to their desire to make correct responses under uncertainty (Sherif, 1935) or their desire to be liked by others (Asch, 1955). By relying on others’ opinions, individuals can learn and entertain solutions that they would not have even considered otherwise (Bandura, 1965). More recent work has shown that knowing other’s decisions also influences people’s decisions in online environments. In an online market experiment, whereas good music was always downloaded by many and bad music was always unpopular, the popularities of the pieces in between varied depending on whether or not people knew the number of downloads the pieces had (Salganik, Dodds, & Watts, 2006). In another set of online experiments, subjects liked the same online news stories more when the stories had many existing supporters than when the stories had only a few supporters (Sakamoto et al., 2009). Subjects even switched their preferences when the experimenter flipped the assumed numbers of previous supporters (Sakamoto, 2010; Salganik & Watts, 2008). These past studies on social influence suggest that people’s liking and rating can follow collective opinion in social media