Source: Jon Tyson/Unsplash
A British author found unexpected success through what would have once been thought of as the unlikeliest of means. The author, Vicky Ball, posted to X that she had “sold 2 books 😁😁” at an author’s event before her post went viral.
Once the post went viral (being seen by more than 24 million people), the sales followed, with the novel (“Powerless”) reaching third on Amazon’s best-seller list at one point. Why did this happen? Cass Sunstein’s latest book, How To Become Famous, offers some instructive insights. Underlying these ideas is the theory of behavioral economics which advocates that human behavior is not always rational, and we are greatly susceptible to social influence.
The Music Lab and Social Influence
Sunstein draws from Salganik, Watts, and Dodds (2006) who utilized “The Music Lab Experiment.” The authors contrived an experiment within which participants interacted with a test music market on a website. Participants of the experiment listened to 48 “real but unknown songs by real but unknown bands,” before rating them. One group interacted with the songs independently, while another group was shown how many times each song had been downloaded by other participants (the “social influence group”).
Sunstein entertains the idea that quality—of the product, and in this case, the song—would always prevail. This is not what the study found, however: “To a significant degree, everything turned on initial popularity. Almost any song could end up popular or not, depending on whether or not the first visitors liked it.”
Highlighting the real-world application of this force, notice the prominence of the ratings of other users the next time you are browsing an application such as Apple Music. Going beyond the world of music, Sunstein contends that “the Music Lab is everywhere,” including within the world of ideas around us, including political ideas.
Abnormal Distribution
Sunstein furthers his argument by highlighting the abnormal distribution of popularity when it comes to different forms of media (music, art, books, and movies). Popularity in this sphere is not linear or normally disturbed; the most popular in each group enjoys excessive popularity. To demonstrate this point, he brings in a study by Martindale (1995) reporting that amongst 602 well-known poets of the English language, the most popular of these enjoyed exceptional success. Of the 34,516 books written about these 602 poets, a whopping 26.4 percent are written about Shakespeare, with the top 12 poets accounting for around 50 percent of the books.
While this example illustrates well how these dynamics can crystalize over a long timeline, in terms of our author and her novel, the same dynamics are seen over a shorter period; intensified attention and sales that are disproportionate and not linearly distributed.
Informational Cascades
Sunstein believes some of this dynamic can be understood by way of “informational cascades.” In his telling, informational cascades build through initial determinations that are then sustained, such as the initial download figures that later influenced participants in the Music Lab experiment. Sunstein wisely highlights that cascades can be akin to bubbles, and bubbles as we well know often burst. This can be protected against if there is some substance or quality to the underlying product being ‘cascaded’—if it is truly of poor quality, the cascade will likely not last.
Coming back to Vicky Ball’s book, it will be interesting to see how its performance maintains over the coming weeks and months, once the motivating force of the viral post slows down.
Source: Alexander Shatov/Unsplash
New Technologies
Sunstein highlights that an informational cascade, or fame more broadly, would have taken years, perhaps decades, to build in pre-modern times, such was the slow pace of information and the relatively low reach of news. Now, with the modern tools of social media, information can travel at unprecedented speed.
“It is staggeringly easy to generate social influences, by triggering either the appearance of the reality of widespread enthusiasm in essentially an instant.”
Prophetically for the case of the author at hand, Sunstein continues: “On a social media site, a day or an hour might vault some person or product into real prominence, not least by giving people an immediate sense that the person or that product is liked or admired by many other people.”
Sunstein notes that while the speed and acceleration that can now occur, facilitated by new technologies and social media, is unprecedented, the underlying psychological dynamics that they exploit are “as old as humanity.”
In our lifetime, we have witnessed countless examples of something unexpected going viral. Sunstein’s thesis serves us well in understanding some of the psychological processes that can trigger and sustain these, with Vicky Ball’s virality-fueled bestseller being but one example of the manifestation of these forces.
Social Media Essential Reads
As we continue down a path of higher-powered and more pervasive technologies, as well as more ideologically orientated gatekeepers of these technologies, virality and cascading become forces that we should be all the more mindful of as they influence real-world behaviors at a group level.
