The Danger of Social Recommendation: GroupThink

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We often use referrals, a social recommendation from someone we know, as a filter. Employers, investors, and people in common social interactions use social recommendations all the time. A friend introduces you to a friend, and you give the person a lot more time than a stranger (and directly or indirectly give them a chance at building a relationship with you). Employers find people through their current employees. And investors only listen to people that have been introduced to them. The stronger the relationship the investor has with the “introducer”, the higher you end up on the investor’s priority list.

But there’s one big implication of our natural usage of social recommendations: social recommendation makes us very vulnerable to groupthink. And groupthink is often detrimental.

Take the example of investors. Investors tend to move in herds. Why is this? Well here’s one big reason:

People focused on the same topics tend to be highly networked. We gravitate to people that are interested in the same things we are. It gives us something to talk about and provides shared experience. This makes us happy. It also causes people to form knowledge communities, or “guilds” as I call them). When you have a group of incestuously networked people, social recommendation causes the same ideas and impressions to be passed around. You then have groupthink herd mentality.

I suppose this is why we have platitudes like, “don’t believe everything you hear.” The only problem is that we don’t have chance to think about all the things we’re exposed to and analyze them. Consequently, we’re heavily influenced by our peers, and our thoughts and attitudes change and conform without us even realizing it–particularly the things we’re unable to objectively analyze for various reasons (emotional attachment, time contstraints, etc.) The memes take over.

I think this is some rather accurate and valuable theory on some of the common social dynamics we experience. As much as we talk about the importance of recommendations and referrals, we forget about the potential detriments.

Corollary to all of this: Value the guy that seems to never listen to anyone and always has to do things differently. Also read and recommend his blog … often…. ;)

-Kevin
6.7.2010

Bryan Hernandez

This stuff is all really interesting. It plays into 'Confirmation Bias,' which I love to talk about. But in this context it's a group confirmation bias (I just threw up in my mouth a little).

Gregory Berns, chair of 'Neuroeconomics' at Emory Uni, has written a book, Iconoclast, about these people that are immune to the aforementioned meme. He says often times they're ostracized as anti-social, and this leads to increased conviction and a NGAF attitude, or something less constructive.

Just to add a bit to what you've already said, I think it's interesting to note that the people that have traditionally been a social minority, been socially marginalized in some way, or those that have persevered through great hardship are those that are most commonly the observed 'iconoclasts,' to use Berns' terms. This can be easily seen by looking at the types of backgrounds of perennially successful entrepreneurs or scientists.

In other words, being an outcast or underdog, psychologically speaking, gives you a lot of freedom to challenge traditional dogmas and 'group think.'

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