How powerful is the effect of social proof on middle-school aged football players? Fairly powerful as seen below.

Extremely rewarding slide presentation by a Google UX researcher.

Main takeaways for me:

• “Make no mistake about this. Everyone in this room will need to learn how to design social features on websites. Whether you like it or not.” (biggest surprise from our recent usability study is the repeated call for “personalization” of our services)
• Social networks are not only about “friends”
• Strong ties = typically 4 people you care about the most (range: 2-6)
• Weak ties = 150 people max.
• Temporary ties = librarians, instructors, etc. (a connection which is highly influenced by trust)
• People generally have 4-6 groups of less than 10 people based upon various life stages (college, a particular class, family, a community) which probably don’t overlap much, if at all.
• People make decisions based on their interactions with the above groupings. In other words: networked critical thinking

Fun video taken at the Sasquatch Festival this year which demonstrates a social proof timeline:

innovator > early adopters > mob

If you ever get a chance to see a show at the gorge in George, WA … do it.

Recently I was tasked to come up with a current awareness tool that tracks the ongoing debate surrounding Net Neutrality. The challenge for this project was to create something that wouldn’t just capture all activity for the keywords, but to filter out everything except for articles with the most social activity. The tools I used for this were PostRank, Yahoo Pipes, and TwitterFeed. The resulting feed comes in two flavors:

1. RSS: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=4fb3b4ef2e272af1db49cb43c0a3d399&_render=rss
2. Twitter: http://twitter.com/PRNetNeutrality

Goal:

Provide a current awareness feed that aggregates posts from the web which are the most “interacted-with”, but without swamping subscribers.

The sources used were Delicious, Digg, CircleID, Save the Internet Blog, and Google News

Methodology:

1. Use PostRank to analyze the above feeds for engagement scoring. The raw results can be viewed under the PostRank topic net-neutrality
2. Use Yahoo Pipes to filter out postings that have PostRank scores below 6.0 while combining the results into a single feed. After monitoring these feeds for a while, a score of 6.0 or higher seemed to be producing the best results.
3. Convert that feed into a low-traffic twitter bot via TwitterFeed

The resulting format for each post is:

[PostRank score] [Post Title] [Post Date] [Post text & link]

Key findings:

1. The resulting feed is low traffic and highly relevant, but not what you might call “breaking news”. Most results are a day old at least. I don’t think this is a bug, but a feature. If a person were to build a series of these, the result would be highly relevant postings which push out only the most active items. This would be good for monitoring topics that are interesting, but not an obsession. In a way, this is an example of a tool that makes use of the principles of “social proof“.
2. The Google News source is a little disappointing because PostRank scores every article as “1.0″. I’m not quite sure why this is, but I’ve I’ve kept it in the source list in case things change.
3. C0mbining social aggregators like Digg or Delicious with a tool like PostRank works out quite nicely.

This link is meant to close the loop on an article I wrote for the wonderful blog In the Library with the Lead Pipe: Social Proof – A Tool for Determining Authority.

The question this article seeks to ask is: to what extent can the library website framework, with all of its catalogs, vendors, guides, etc., become recognized as an authority in the subject of research?

A recent article by Chung & Duckett over at In the Library with the Lead Pipe has inspired me to try and expand on some thoughts on the importance of social proof. I especially like their third category of learning objects:

CATEGORY 3. Provide students with MORE CONTEXT to understand a process or concept — the BACK STORY for how information is created, vetted, stored, accessed, and used. Resources in this category address social issues surrounding information and other scholarly communication topics  …

With the kind of one-off teaching I do, I’m often tempted to get into the concept of social proof, but haven’t yet found the best way to go about it that justifies the time spent. Creating a learning object may be the best route, since it’s something a student can work through on their own time, and it wouldn’t take up valuable class time. If an instructor only has 50 minutes a semester to teach a subject, every minute counts. Here’s an outline for a potential learning object, if I were to do one that satisfies category 3 above:

Outline for an Academic Publishing / Social Proof Learning Object

In Cialdini’s book Influence: the psychology of persuasion (I’m referring to the second edition-1988), he describes the phenomena thusly:

The principle of social proof states that we use information about the way others have behaved to help us determine proper conduct for ourselves. As the dropped-wallet experiment showed, we are most influenced in this fashion by the actions of peoople who are like us. [p. 140]

As Cialdini demonstrates in his book, “the principle of social proof is so wide-ranging and powerful that its domain extends to the fundamental decision for life or death.” Where this effect really comes into play is in areas of uncertainty. Take for example this story from 2007 about the renowned violinist who played in the DC subway. The passersby were unknowingly thrust into a very uncertain situation:

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment? … No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. … In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

The answer, of course, was no. This led the Washington Post to shout the following question (emphasis is theirs):

IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD?

It’s a tree falling in the forest kind of question. But the answer has to be yes, he is good. The problem was that he had no social proof going for him at all. Cialdini suggests proving this to yourself by conducting the following experiment on your own on two subsequent days. The first day stand on a crowded corner and look up at a section of sky for one full minute. Chances are you’ll have no one else look up. The next day, at exactly the same time, bring along four of your friends to look with you. Chances are on the second day you’ll receive a great deal of interest. Your friends will be “similar others” to yourself. It will inspire other similar people to take a look as well. If the Washington Post had dressed up four or five people as commuters, and placed them in the subway listening, enraptured by the music, they would have probably created a pedestrian traffic jam.

I believe this is related to academic peer review in the following way. Take a look at this image from Cialdini’s book, pg. 114:

Let’s parse the cartoon one stage at a time, from left to right:

1. The lonely researcher, working in relative isolation on things only s/he is paying attention to.
2. An editor pays attention. (Who is the child? How should I know? Work with me here!) Note that in a non-academic setting, this could well be a marketer instead.
3. The arrival of “similar others”. In academic publishing these are peer reviewers. They would be colleagues with knowledge in the field, serious types. In the non-academic world, the marketer will have selected “others” similar to the ideal target market.
4. A crowd recognizes a group of “similar others”, and, possibly through some form of self preservation, will take a look for themselves since it’s obvious that it is important. Note that the woman in the ivory tower (okay, it’s just a window) has noticed the rabble as well. She looks up  for the same reasons.
5. The whole world is now looking, even the authorities notice (here represented by an angel.)

The phenomenon of social proof is everywhere on the web. In academics, peer reviewers are used to establish seriousness in the form of thoroughly-vetted “similar others”. On the open web, similar others are discovered by paying attention to certain social software systems and communities: Facebook, Twitter, Digg (or Digggraphr), HotStuff, and Memeorandum are a few examples among thousands.

- end of tutorial -

So that’s the learning object outlined, everything aside from the hard work of animating it. I believe Chung and Duckett are right that back stories are crucial for students to understand concepts such as academic publishing. Librarians need to dig deeper and create more objects that can be shared widely to promote this type of knowledge. I’ll be sharing this one as soon as I can get it peer-reviewed.

CopyBlogger has an interesting write-up on social proof. A lengthy quote:

So, social proof gives us important cues about how to behave in ambiguous social situations. But what’s ambiguous about social media?

First of all, we’re not sure if we should pay attention. Given the vast amount of information we’re exposed to daily, we naturally look for quick cues about the quality of what we come across. And we’re wired to look to others for those indications of quality.

Secondly, we look for cues as to whether or not to accept the message itself. If you’re reading something in your area of expertise, you’re less likely to look for external indicators. But if the topic or position is new to you or novel in any way, you’ll likely be influenced by the raw popularity of the piece, plus the specific comments of others who’ve come before.

But there’s also a negative side to the effect. If no one really knows what’s going on, and everyone is basing thier judgements on everyone else, then bad things can happen. Here’s a quote from Erin Prophet, daughter of Elizabeth Claire Prophet from the Church Universal and Triumphant, on what happened in the early 90′s when a prophesied end of the world didn’t occur:

In the book’s preface, Prophet writes that one reason she penned the account is to expose the flawed thinking that led to her mother’s “apocalyptic prophecies” and the shelters built in their wake.

“Since then I have spent many sleepless nights asking myself why and how it happened and whether there was anything I could have done to change the outcome,” she writes. “It was a mistake, a Napoleon-invading-Russia sort of blunder, which arose from a collection of ideas that obscured and tarnished my mother’s life work.”

She sees CUT’s story “as a cautionary tale of what happens when such ideas are taken to an extreme.”

As powerful as social proof is, there is a potential downside. The potential this downside has on the social internet, I have no idea.

Clay Shirky, in this recent session at Web 2.0, talks about how the filter has moved downstream from those who are responsible for publishing, to those who consume. The initial, visceral, effect of this is the well-known and overhyped “information overload” meme. In the above talk Shirky places the blame for information overload squarely on the head of outdated filters, a situation he labels “filter failure.” Below is a step in the right direction.

In this very interesting post over at ReadWriteWeb about online noise, Marshall Kirkpatrick mentions a wonderful experiment in noise control: AideRSS. The service uses a five-element filter called PostRank to dynamically measure an engagement facet. This works by measuring the engagement resulting from individual posts on a scale from 1 – 10 (with 10 being the most engaging). The theory is that the more a post stimulates engagement, the better the post. PostRank uses what it calls the “5 C’s” to measure engagement:

1. Creating: a post that causes others to create something original
2. Critiquing: leaving a comment on the post
3. Chatting: sharing the post via Twitter, etc.
4. Collecting: sharing via a social bookmarking service
5. Clicking: simple page views

The result is an enhanced method of filtering large amounts of postings, like this example of AideRSS in action on Firefox using Google Reader:

Filtering Multiple RSS Feeds at a PR score of 6.0 and Over

What’s interesting about filtering multiple feeds is how useful it is.  While Google Reader reports 363 posts for my Web2.0 folder (which currently holds 18 feeds), filtering for the “best” knocks that list down to a mere 11 postings. 363 is more than I can really digest, and when it gets to be that heavy I am sorely tempted to “mark all as read” so I can resolve to keep up later. AideRSS allows me to grab just the most active postings and forget the rest if I don’t have time. (and who does, really?)

Further, the AideRSS filter allows you to analyze a specific RSS feed, like this recent feed from ACRLog:

ACRLog with filter set to 'all'

This gives me a recent history of postings from which I can get a sense of the quality of the feed. I can even add up the scores for 100 postings and then average them (which I won’t do, not enough time.) But that would give me another view of the feed, kind of like an impact factor for weblogs.

This is an exciting tool, with lots of potential for libraries if we could only find a way to capture an engagement facet.

Reading Stephen Downes’ article today on Connective Knowledge I was struck by how strongly the following outline describing the distribution of knowledge across a network of connections reminded me of social proof:

Summary: Connective knowledge is both:
- knowledge OF networks in the world
- knowledge obtained BY networks

As I outlined earlier, Social Proof relies on the “awesome influence of the behavior of similar others” in a way that’s illustrated in this cartoon from Cialdini’s book Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion on page 120:

As shown above, knowledge is gained both of networks, and via networks, by way of the identification of the self as part of a group.

Here’s another example, by way of a conversation I overheard today at the campus coffee shop. In this shop the students choose the music which plays (loudly) over the stores PA. Today they were listening to Beirut with all of its horns, accordians, mandolins, etc. A girl behind the counter half-heartedly (but hopefully) remarked that it sounds like they are all getting ready to join the circus. The guy next to her says (a little breathlessly) “I know, isn’t it awesome!?”

There was a ton of information flowing in that little exchange. The girl was discovering a network of experience she wasn’t quite sure about, or at least was unfamiliar with. The social proof that appeared to be swaying her in the direction of acceptance was the existence of tacit and explicit endorsement by her peers around her. It was obvious that she was on the verge of endorsing the music herself, and therefore becoming privy to whatever knowledge was to be had by this new found connection. It was also obvious, from the detached standpoint I was in, that the music was instantly transformed by the endorsement of her peers. I could literally see the wheels click into place.

It’s been one of those months where several ideas seem to congeal all at once. Last year I conducted usability interviews with students where I asked them if they were worried about the authority of the documents they were finding. 100% of that sample said they were not. That made little sense to me until this month when I received my copy of Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous and also stumbled upon the idea of Social Proof.

I vividly remember learning in Library School that everything is not miscellaneous. That point was brought up repeatedly and emphatically. But if that’s true, why is the rest of the Internet blithely ignoring us? It seems that Librarians have lost the authority to assert the claim because the users have routed around us and built their own structures based on miscellany.

From Everything is Miscellaneous:

[The business value of content organization] creates a conundrum for businesses as they enter the digital order. If they don’t allow their users to structure information for themselves, they’ll lose their patrons. If they do allow patrons to structure information for themselves, the organizations will lose much of their authority, power, and control.

The Paradox is already resolving itself. Customers, patrons, users, and citizens are not waiting for permission to take control of finding and organizing information. And we’re doing it not just as individuals. Knowledge–its content and its organization–is becoming a social act. [p. 133]

Our users aren’t waiting on Information Scientists to organize their world because they are their own authorities. For a vivid representation of this zeitgeist, see this photo of street art found via StumbleUpon:

In Cialdini’s book Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion he talks about the enormous influence of Social Proof. Here’s the cartoon version found on page 120 (it reminds me strongly of how Digg, Del.icio.us, and other tagging systems work) :

In that cartoon, I love how even the Gods (Angels, whatever) have to start paying attention eventually. This type of behavior is happening all over the place. Take for example the ongoing effect the internet is having on Journalism. Old-school journalists are being forced to start paying attention to the opinions and reporting of bloggers, their own opinion pages are losing authority, their classified advertising model is basically dead, and it’s all because of the phenomenon addressed in that cartoon. It’s simply more profitable for a user to pay attention to their peers than to traditional authorities.

According to Cialdini, what’s going on is the “awesome influence of the behavior of similar others” [p. 152], i.e. Social Proof. By now we all know the drill for finding “similar others”: in order to find anything on your topic, consult with others similarly interested (usually via wikipedia, the popularity indexing of Google, Digg, Technorati, etc., maybe even a bibliography.) The technique is so successful, why worry about the authority of what you’ve found?

It seems clear to me that some type of social similarity ranking mechanism needs to be made available by librarians for their patrons. Either that or we wait around for them to build their own, because they will and they are.

DoshDosh has a good writeup on Social Proof from a marketing perspective.

Researcher Nikhil Bhatla has a highly technical (but fascinating) take.

Columbia professor Duncan Watts appears to be researching in this space.

Another business-related writeup, this time from Take Back Your Brain!