Social Proof and Cream Puffs

A few months back, I was walking down a street and ran into a line of more than 40 people, impatiently waiting for their turn to order… cream puffs! I obviously felt the urge to try them and ended up waiting in line for more than 30 minutes. You have probably experienced something similar. After all, most of us are prone to this kind of imitative behavior, as psychological research on persuasion shows.

In instances such as the previous one, we are answering to a psychological principle that Robert Cialdini has dubbed “The Social Proof Principle” or “The Consensus Principle”. Basically, the principle states that humans, as a social species, tend to do what most people do. An experimental demonstration of the principle is portrayed in the following video:

With the towel experiment, Cialdini demonstrated the cognitive force of considerations related to the behavior of others. They’re so powerful that can even trump considerations that it is reasonable to expect would be more persuasive (after all, environmental information is more germane to the decision to reuse a towel than information about what others do).

In marketing, The Social Proof Principle is everywhere you look: from coupons sites such as Honey (“17 million members and counting”) to dating apps such as Doulike (“Join 3 million singles for free”). An interesting question to explore is whether consensus, or social proof, affect our experiences themselves, or only our behavior.

Let’s take the example of canned laughter, the one you hear in a typical comedy show, such as The Big Bang Theory or, my personal favourite, Two and a Half Men. Take a look at this short clip of the Big Bang Theory:

Awkward. That’s the first adjective that comes to mind. Without the laugh tracks we’re so used to hear, the show does not strike me as funny anymore. So, do we just laugh to fit in with the imaginary crowd that laughs, or do we actually find the show funnier with the laughs? Research on canned laughter is not conclusive; some studies suggest that this type of laughter has an effect not only on our behavior but also on humour ratings, while others claim its effect falls short of this and is only behavioral (Platow, 2005). From a first-person perspective, I think canned laughter, and social proof in general, changes our experiences themselves.

Coming back to the example of laughter, probably you can remember some times when you laughed out of conformity, just because everybody else was doing so. This feels very different from watching an episode of The Big Bang Theory, with all the instances of canned laughter. If canned laughter was just an add-on to force you to laugh, and not a device to modify your experience of the show, watching it, instead of delightful, would be a draining, exhausting, experience (similar to the kind of experience you feel when you hang out with a group of people whose humour style does not match yours). And I believe this extends to experiences we consider less social in nature, like food taste. I suspect the cream puffs would not have tasted so good if I hadn’t seen so many people waiting in line.

However, social proof has its limits. This fact was illustrated in a study by psychologist Solomon Ash. Ash conducted an experiment where he asked subjects to estimate the length of a set of lines and choose the one they thought more closely resembled the length of a sample line. What he found is that there was a strong conformity effect, in which many subjects chose a wrong answer because others (confederates) have done the same before them. However, in contrast to the previous examples, the behavior of the group did not have an effect on the private opinion of the subject: despite answering in a conformist manner, the subjects still believed the answer was not the one they had given. This was demonstrated using another setting, where the answers of the subjects were private, not public. The consensus of others, in this case, was not enough to obscure the participants’ clear perception of the correct choice. And something similar would happen with canned laughter. The TV show of Smithers and Mr Burns in the brilliantly crafted “Rosebud” episode of the fifth season of The Simpsons is a good example of this:

Canned laughter is ineffective in Mr Burns show because it is the background to scenes that are unequivocally not funny. And something parallel would have happened with the cream puffs. If I had found them definitely stale or bland, the long line would have only been a great mystery for me (not a source of additional pleasure when tasting the puffs). To sum up, it could be said that the power of social proof to modify our experience is limited to those scenarios where there is a fit between our experiences and the social proof provided by others.

One consequence for marketers is obvious. Consensus cannot be bought. Some sneaky platforms have come up with a “clever” approach to hurt business: selling Google Reviews. A good rating on Google will, for sure, attract customers. However, ethical considerations aside, doing this is a bad policy. Artificial consensus cannot stand the test of time because, as we saw, our experiences don’t lie. If the food in a “4.5” restaurant is awful, people are not coming back, no matter what those fake reviews say. For marketers, social proof is bound to fail if real value does not back it up.

References

Platow, Michael J. ; Haslam, S. Alexander ; Both, Amanda ; Chew, Ivanne ; Cuddon, Michelle ; Goharpey, Nahal ; Maurer, Jacqui ; Rosini, Simone ; Tsekouros, Anna And Grace, Diana M. (2005) “It’s not funny is they’re laughing”: Self-categorization, social influence, and responses to canned laughter.  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol.41(5), p.542-550