prasad1
Active member
Imagine you’re dining out at a casual restaurant with some friends. After looking over the menu, you decide to order the (say Aloo Gobi). But then, after a dinner companion orders a salad for their main course, you declare: “I’ll have the salad too.”
This kind of situation – making choices that you probably otherwise wouldn’t make were you alone – probably happens more often than you think in a wide variety of settings, from eating out to shopping and even donating to charity. And it’s not just a matter of you suddenly realising the salad sounds more appetising.
Prior research has shown people have a tendency to mimic the choices and behaviours of others. But other work suggests people also want to do the exact opposite to signal their uniqueness in a group by making a different choice from others.
As scholars who examine consumer behaviour, we wanted to resolve this discrepancy: What makes people more likely to copy others’ behaviour and what leads them to do their own thing?
A social signal
We developed a theory that how and why people match or mimic others’ choices depends a lot on the attributes of the thing being selected.
Choices have what we call ordinal attributes that can be ranked objectively – such as size or price – as well as nominal attributes that are not as easily ranked – such as flavour or shape. We hypothesised that ordinal attributes have more social influence, alerting others to what may be seen as appropriate in a given context.
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This kind of situation – making choices that you probably otherwise wouldn’t make were you alone – probably happens more often than you think in a wide variety of settings, from eating out to shopping and even donating to charity. And it’s not just a matter of you suddenly realising the salad sounds more appetising.
Prior research has shown people have a tendency to mimic the choices and behaviours of others. But other work suggests people also want to do the exact opposite to signal their uniqueness in a group by making a different choice from others.
As scholars who examine consumer behaviour, we wanted to resolve this discrepancy: What makes people more likely to copy others’ behaviour and what leads them to do their own thing?
A social signal
We developed a theory that how and why people match or mimic others’ choices depends a lot on the attributes of the thing being selected.
Choices have what we call ordinal attributes that can be ranked objectively – such as size or price – as well as nominal attributes that are not as easily ranked – such as flavour or shape. We hypothesised that ordinal attributes have more social influence, alerting others to what may be seen as appropriate in a given context.
The science of decision-making: How and why we copy the choices of others
New research on consumer behavior shows that we tend to match some types of choices the people around us make, but not others.
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