The Need for “Social Proof” May Be Genetic, Not Just Psychological

Last week Dan Zarrella, the leading independent “social and viral marketing scientist” (as far as I know), published an extremely insightful piece on the importance of “social proof” in evaluating everyday decisions. Dan sums up this concept quite well:

Social proof is the idea that people rely on the reaction of others to make decisions, and we assume that others (individuals and especially groups) know more about the choice than we do.

The role of social proof is indisputable in almost every form of human interaction and decision-making. While at first it might seem like this is rooted in some common human psychological shortcoming, like insecurity about being left out, the cause could be more fundamental still.

Neuroscientist Gregory Berns discusses the significance of this herd mentality in his new book, Iconoclast. He argues that this as a sort of evolutionary internalization of the Law of Large Numbers, which basically dictates that the more data points you have, the more accurately you can estimate the mean (average) of an unknown variable. The implications of this are that if a consumer is trying to estimate an unknown value (such as a the quality of a new product), seeing many other consumers purchasing the product helps to estimate this unknown and ultimately decide the product might be worth purchasing. Berns writes,

Viewed from the perspective of evolution, the law of large numbers will give any animal that uses it a distinct advantage. Consider a creature whose life depends on finding food and water. One strategy would be to forage for food in the hopes of stumbling upon something good to eat. If successful, this could pay off handsomely because the animal could horde it and gain an advantage over its competitors. This would be a risky strategy with a relatively low likelihood of success but a high payoff if it worked. The law of large numbers, however, says that such an individual strategy would most likely fail. Another animal, that was perhaps a little more strategic in its thinking, would observe what other animals did before deciding its own course of action. Because a group is statistically superior to an individual, an animal that discovered this strategy would always do better than the loner. In addition to vastly increasing the likelihood of success, the second strategy is much lower in risk and does not cost the animal much energy to observe what other animals do. The power of the group is so much greater than the individual, evolution favored animals that used it, and “groupthink” became the dominant strategy for all animals that could observe each other’s behavior.

If this is true, and social proof is rooted essentially in our DNA, how can we afford to ignore its significance?

Most social media tools inherently provide mechanisms for indicating endorsement by other users. It’s easy to see how many followers an individual has on Twitter, or how many monthly active users a Facebook application has. How are you implementing indicators of social proof and utilizing social media to validate your personal or corporate brand?

If you enjoyed this post, please take a moment to share it: