Our research highlights the importance of social influence for cultural choice and the propagation of aggregate trends. Social scientists have long recognized the importance of social influence in opaque settings where outcomes are highly uncertain, such as financial markets, political elections, and cultural industries. Within the sociology of markets, cultural industries have received particular attention because they typically lack objective standards of valuation.
Social influence can give rise to complex dynamics and hard-to-predict collective outcomes. In cultural markets, where the value of products is often uncertain, individuals tend to rely on the choices of others to guide their own. When people respond to others who are themselves reacting in similar ways, the resulting dynamics often produce highly skewed outcomes. These outcomes include the rise of “hits” and “superstars,” some of whom may owe their prominence less to intrinsic quality than to the self-reinforcing nature of social attention.
At IAS we study these and related phenomena in markets for music and literature. Our research applies models of social influence to prominent sites of social valuation like the Nobel Prize for Literature. More recently, the advent of online music streaming has allowed the study of cultural dynamics on a very large scale. Analyzing listening behavior at Spotify, we identify a social-influence mechanism that can widen individuals’ music choices and lead to the emergence of new stars. Social influence thereby has the capacity to decouple collective outcomes, that here is who becomes successful, from the original likes and dislikes of the involved audiences.
