A tale of two coffee machines - Weapon of Influence in action | Hacker News Reader

A tale of two coffee machines - Weapon of Influence in action

blog.smartupz.com

14 pointsJarekS4 comments

I think that this Social Proof is one of the most important factors we take under consideration, also in the internet - how often do you check google search results that are not on one of the first three pages?

And in this case it is also not hard to show that such behaviour is not a winning strategy, if you want to maximalize your chance to make the best choice. But still it seems to be a winning strategy, if you want to avoid making the worst one.

I think the catch here is that people tend to think that they in fact want to make best choices and not just avoid the worst ones.

Social Proof is one of the most important automatisms we use everyday. Yet I don't agree that it makes sense to use it to avoid making worst decisions.

Last weeks of Bull market on stock exchange is the best example of the situation where people follow Social Proof and at the same time they are making worst possible thing (buying overpriced stock).

I agree that it's a very good example that following Social Proof can be misleading, but I still think it makes sense as a strategy to minimalize the risk of making a very bad decision. I realize that it's preety vague ant thus not exceptionally interesting point though :).

Actually, you can even point out that a decision made by the majority can't be the worst one in a social sense and I don't think it's completely stupid - after all, if you're in a social group and don't know what to do, it's always good to make sure that you won't end up worse that the majority since it happens quite seldom that the majority ends up very bad.

Summary: an anecdote about a hotel dining room with 2 bean-to-cup coffee machines. One exposes the beans so that users can see it is fresh ground, the other does not. A queue forms for the explicitly fresh coffee whilst the other machine remains largely unused.

Hypotheses: we are pack followers, we like to see our coffee is fresh.

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