SOCI 1101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Carly Smithson, Qwerty, Social Influence
30 Oct 2016
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Document Summary
Why did american idol become so successful. Corporations often test films, songs, etc. by having people rate them. This is what salganik & watts studied in an ingenious web-based experiment at. Visitors to a teen -oriented website were invited to participate in a study of musical taste. Participants were given a menu of 48 songs by bands that had never heard of. Invited to listen and if they wanted to, download them as well. To answer this: 12,00+ listeners randomly assigned to 2 groups. 2 groups: independent: listeners could only see the name of the band and song, social influence: listeners could see name of the band and song, and how many times it had been downloaded. Listeners who knew how often a song had been downloaded were more likely to download those popular songs. And it made for bigger hits as well. These songs also did better when there was information (social influence)
