Jumping on the bandwagon

This post is the ninth part of a series of business-friendly posts, looking at cognitive biases and how they impact our ability to communicate effectively.

The Bandwagon Effect — what is it?

The Bandwagon Effect is a phenomenon whereby the probability of someone adopting a belief, idea, fad or trend increases the more that it has been already taken up by others. And it isn’t necessarily a bad thing — like many cognitive biases, it certainly isn’t always a bad rule of thumb.

Let’s say that you are visiting a small town in France for the first time on holiday and you come across two restaurants. Your stomach rumbles so you know it’s time to eat. How do you choose which one to go to?

If you are a food expert, with a high level of knowledge of French cooking, you would take a look at the menus, find out about the chefs, judge the quality of service based on what you can see and probably take in a few other factors that I’m not even aware of.

However, if you don’t have an intimate knowledge of haute cuisine, you will probably choose whichever one looks the busiest.

The reality is that most people aren’t experts in every field and so copy the choices that other people make.

Why it occurs:

In many cases an individual simply doesn’t have the knowledge (or the time to gain the knowledge) to make a decision based on all the potential inputs available. So a proxy decision is “if others like it, it must be OK”.

Where might you see it occur in real life?

It crops up throughout society all the time. We decide what fashion we like based on what people agree looks good (replace fashion with film/album/TV show/video game) because very few individuals have the data to make that choice on their own. If enough people agree then, to a certain extent, the rule of thumb has worked. Rather than studying 50 new smartphones in detail, interviewing the companies producing them (and their various subcontractors), why not assume that the market has already figured out which is the best and go with that?

Why is it important?

The problem with a bandwagon is that often ‘information cascades’ can occur in which people will ignore underlying evidence to the contrary, or their own personal signals, just to conform and follow the behaviour of others. Why? Safety is perhaps one reason. Ambiguity is another — if the information isn’t clear to you but everyone else is doing it, that makes it easier to make the decision to go with the flow.

What is the impact in business?

Let’s look at four potential scenarios:

1. Your company is hiring and a candidate has just gone through several rounds of interviews with eight people, including you. A group meeting is called to discuss the candidate — it is perfectly plausible (however uncomfortable it makes you feel reading this) that if one or two people speak up for/against the candidate, a bandwagon might form in which everyone agrees. Watch out for this.
2. A similar situation can come about when discussing strategy and direction for a business: we agree just because it seems to be what everyone else wants to go for.
3. If you are communicating a message (let’s say as part of a pitch), your audience will be looking for evidence that whatever you are communicating has convinced other people. If you don’t have that, it is more difficult for your audience to get on board. As a result, you should always make the effort to demonstrate that what you are saying has some kind of traction — whether that’s existing customers, investors, or just true believers.
4. If you are buying a product, service or idea, watch out for this too — just because “everyone else is doing it”, doesn’t make it right for you — evaluate the situation and use the facts if you can.

As a rule of thumb, a bandwagon can be a highly effective time saving device for humans — a great way to correct for asymmetric information between buyer and seller. As with any cognitive bias, you have to be aware of it when communicating and understand how it can help or hinder your approach.

If you want to know more please feel free to connect or check out a collection of cognitive biases here. Next up we will take a look at the Clustering Illusion.