The marginal majority effect: when social influence produces lock-in

Alexandros Gelastopoulos (alexandros.gelastopoulos@iast.fr), Pantelis Analytis, Gael Le Mens and Arnout van de Rijt
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Alexandros Gelastopoulos: IAST - Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse
Pantelis Analytis: Unknown
Gael Le Mens: Unknown
Arnout van de Rijt: Unknown

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Abstract: People are influenced by the choices of others, a phenomenon observed across contexts in the social and behavioral sciences. Social influence can lock in an initial popularity advantage of an option over a higher quality alternative. Yet several experiments designed to enable social influence have found that social systems self-correct rather than lock-in. Here we identify a behavioral phenomenon that makes inferior lock-in possible, which we call the ‘marginal majority effect': A discontinuous increase in the choice probability of an option as its popularity exceeds that of a competing option. We demonstrate the existence of marginal majority effects in several recent experiments and show that lock-in always occurs when the effect is large enough to offset the quality effect on choice, but rarely otherwise. Our results reconcile conflicting past empirical evidence and connect a behavioral phenomenon to the possibility of social lock-in.

Keywords: social influence; self-reinforcing process; self-correcting process; marginal majority; lock-in (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-03-14
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