Editing Popularity (section)

== The popularity of objects as a consequence of social influence ==

=== Information cascades ===
Popularity is a term widely applicable to the modern era thanks primarily to social networking technology. Being "liked" has been taken to a completely different level on ubiquitous sites such as [[Facebook]].

Popularity is a social phenomenon but it can also be ascribed to objects that people interact with. Collective attention is the only way to make something popular, and information cascades play a large role in rapid rises in something's popularity.<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Zaman|first1=Tauhid|last2=Fox|first2=Emily B.|author2-link=Emily B. Fox|last3=Bradlow|first3=Eric T.|date=September 2014|title=A Bayesian approach for predicting the popularity of tweets|journal=The Annals of Applied Statistics|language=en|volume=8|issue=3|pages=1583–1611|doi=10.1214/14-AOAS741|issn=1932-6157|doi-access=free|arxiv=1304.6777}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|date=1886 |editor1=James Silk Buckingham |editor2=John Sterling |editor3=Frederick Denison Maurice |editor4=Henry Stebbing |editor5=Charles Wentworth Dilke |editor6=Thomas Kibble Hervey |editor7=William Hepworth Dixon |editor8=Norman Maccoll |editor9=Vernon Horace Rendall |editor10=John Middleton Murry|journal=The Athenaeum: Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Music, and the Drama |page=27}}{{page needed|reason=This actually needs a specific date. There were two journals published that year and while page 27 appears in both, neither jumps out as being the correct edition.|date=February 2020}}</ref> Rankings for things in popular culture, like movies and music, often do not reflect the public's taste, but rather the taste of the first few buyers because [[social influence]] plays a large role in determining what is popular and what is not through an [[information cascade]].

Information cascades have strong influence causing individuals to imitate the actions of others, whether or not they are in agreement. For example, when downloading music, people don't decide 100% independently which songs to buy. Often they are influenced by charts depicting which songs are already trending. Since people rely on what those before them do, one can manipulate what becomes popular among the public by manipulating a website's download rankings.<ref name="Cornell">{{cite web|url = https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2011/11/13/information-cascade-in-music/ |publisher= Cornell University|date = 13 November 2011|title= Information Cascade in Music |website = Networks: Course blog for INFO 2040/CS 2850/Econ 2040/SOC 2090}}</ref> Experts paid to predict sales often fail but not because they are bad at their jobs; instead, it is because they cannot control the information cascade that ensues after first exposure by consumers. Music is again, an excellent example. Good songs rarely perform poorly on the charts and poor songs rarely perform very well, but there is tremendous variance that still makes predicting the popularity of any one song very difficult.<ref name="Salganik">Salganik, J. (2006). Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in and Artificial Cultural Market. ''Science'', 311, 854–856.</ref>

Experts can determine if a product will sell in the top 50% of related products or not, but it is difficult to be more specific than that. Due to the strong impact that influence plays, this evidence emphasizes the need for marketers. They have a significant opportunity to show their products in the best light, with the most famous people, or being in the media most often. Such constant exposure is a way of gaining more product followers. Marketers can often make the difference between an average product and a popular product. However, since popularity is primarily constructed as a general consensus of a group's attitude towards something, [[Word-of-mouth marketing|word-of-mouth]] is a more effective way to attract new attention. Websites and blogs start by recommendations from one friend to another, as they move through social networking services. Eventually, when the fad is large enough, the media catches on to the craze. This spreading by word-of-mouth is the social information cascade that allows something to grow in usage and attention throughout a social group until everyone is telling everyone else about it, at which point it is deemed popular.<ref name="Leskovec">Leskovec, J., Singh, A., and Kleinberg, J. Patterns of Influence in a Recommendation Network.</ref>

Individuals also rely on what others say when they know that the information they are given could be completely incorrect. This is known as [[groupthink]]. Relying on others to influence one's own decisions is a very powerful social influence, but can have negative impacts.<ref name="Anderson">Anderson, L. and Holt, C. (1997). Information cascades in the laboratory ''The American Economic Review'', 87, 847–863.</ref>

=== Zipf's Law ===
[[File:Facebook popularity.PNG|thumb|left|The popularity of [[Facebook]] over time illustrating Zipf's Law]]

The popularity of many different things can be described by [[Zipf's Law|Zipf's powerlaw]], which posits that there is a low frequency of very large quantities and a high frequency of low quantities. This illustrates popularity of many different objects.

For example, there are few very popular websites, but many websites have small followings. This is the result of interest; as many people use e-mail, it is common for sites like [[Yahoo!]] to be accessed by large numbers of people; however, a small subset of people would be interested in a blog on a particular [[video game]]. In this situation, only Yahoo! would be deemed a popular site by the public.<ref name="Adamic">Adamic, L. (2002). Zipf, power-laws, and pareto-a ranking tutorial. ''Glottometrics'', 3, 143–150.</ref> This can additionally be seen in [[social networking service]]s, such as [[Facebook]]. The average number of friends on Facebook is 130, while very few people have large social networks. However, some individuals do have more than 5,000 friends. This reflects that very few people can be extremely well-connected, but many people are somewhat connected. The number of friends a person has, has been a way to determine how popular an individual is, so the small number of people who have an extremely high number of friends is a way of using social networking services, like Facebook, to illustrate how only a few people are deemed popular.<ref name="dunbar">{{cite news|last = Dunbar |first = Robin |date = 25 December 2010|title = You've got to have (150) friends|newspaper = New York Times|url = https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/opinion/26dunbar.html|url-access = limited|url-status = live|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20180906112636/https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/opinion/26dunbar.html|archive-date =6 September 2018}}</ref>
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Popular people may not be those who are best liked interpersonally by their peers, but they do receive most of the positive behavior from coworkers when compared to nonpopular workers.<ref name="Scott" /> This is a result of the differences between sociometric and perceived popularity. When asked who is most popular, employees typically respond based on perceived popularity; however, they really prefer the social interactions with those who are more sociometrically popular. For each individual to ensure that they are consistent with the group's popularity consensus, those who are high in perceived popularity are treated with the same positive behaviors as those who are more interpersonally, but privately, liked by specific individuals. Well-liked workers are most likely to get salary increases and promotions, while disliked (unpopular) workers are the first to get their salary cut back or laid off during recessions.{{Citation needed|date=April 2017}}

During interactions with others in the work environment, more popular individuals receive more organizational citizenship behavior (helping and courteousness from others) and less counter productive work behavior (rude reactions and withheld information) than those who are considered less popular in the workplace.<ref name="Scott" /> Coworkers agree with each other on who is and who is not popular and, as a group, treat popular coworkers more favorably. While popularity has proven to be a big determiner of getting more positive feedback and interactions from coworkers, such a quality matters less in organizations where workloads and interdependence is high, such as the medical field.<ref name="Scott" />

In many instances, physical appearance has been used as one indicator of popularity. Attractiveness plays a large role in the workplace and physical appearance influences hiring, whether or not the job might benefit from it. For example, some jobs, such as salesperson, benefit from attractiveness when it comes down to the bottom line, but there have been many studies which have shown that, in general, attractiveness is not at all a valid predictor of on-the-job performance.<ref name="Shahani">Shahani-Denning, C., Dudhat, P., Tevet, R., & Andreoli, N. (2010). Effect of Physical Attractiveness on Selection Decisions in India and the United States. ''International Journal of Management'', 27(1), 37–51.</ref> Many individuals have previously thought this was only a phenomenon in the more individualistic cultures of the Western world, but research has shown that attractiveness also plays a role in hiring in collectivist cultures as well. Because of the prevalence of this problem during the hiring process in all cultures, researchers have recommended training a group to ignore such influencers, just like legislation has worked to control for differences in sex, race, and disabilities.<ref name="Shahani" />