Arbeitspapier
Like What You Like or Like What Others Like? Conformity and Peer Effects on Facebook
Users of the social networking service Facebook have the possibility to post status updates for their friends to read. In turn, friends may react to these short messages by writing comments or by pressing a Like button to show their appreciation. Making use of five Swedish accounts, we set up a natural field experiment to study whether users are more prone to Like an update if someone else has done so before. We distinguish between three different treatment conditions: (i) one unknown user Likes the update, (ii) three unknown users Like the update and (iii) one peer Likes the update. Whereas the first condition had no effect, both the second and the third increased the probability to express a positive opinion by a factor of two or more, suggesting that both number of predecessors and social proximity matters. We identify three reasonable explanations for the observed herding behavior and isolate conformity as the primary mechanism in our experiment.
- Language
-
Englisch
- Bibliographic citation
-
Series: IFN Working Paper ; No. 886
- Classification
-
Wirtschaft
Sociology of Economics
Field Experiments
Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
- Subject
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Herding Behavior
Conformity
Peer Effects
Field Experiment
Herdenverhalten
Soziale Norm
Social Web
Social Web
Feldforschung
Schweden
- Event
-
Geistige Schöpfung
- (who)
-
Egebark, Johan
Ekström, Mathias
- Event
-
Veröffentlichung
- (who)
-
Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN)
- (where)
-
Stockholm
- (when)
-
2011
- Handle
- Last update
-
10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET
Data provider
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. If you have any questions about the object, please contact the data provider.
Object type
- Arbeitspapier
Associated
- Egebark, Johan
- Ekström, Mathias
- Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN)
Time of origin
- 2011
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