A new study suggests that online comment threads and those who participate in them are susceptible to "herd behavior," ABC News reported.
Researchers of the study, published Thursday in Science and led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Sinan Aral, studied a social media site similar to Reddit.com.
Reddit's premise is that users can post stories to the site and users can then comment on them and comments, as well as the story itself, can receive upvotes and downvotes. As stories receive more upvotes, it moves towards the top of the website. Aral and his team studied just the comments to test the theory of "herd behavior."
"We did the experiment on the comments and not the articles, because an upvoted article might get higher placement on the website," Aral told ABC News.
When a comment was created, he would immediately upvote, downvote or leave it alone. He scored the comment by subtracting its amount of downvotes from its upvotes. Aral found comments he upvoted had higher scores than comments he downvoted or left alone.
Aral did not vote on the articles themselves, but found a difference in the types of stories people were commenting on.
"Stories about politics and culture had a strong social influence bias," he said. "But in other topics, it's nonexistent."
While positive feedback, even if falsified, boosted following upvotes, but the same did not apply for downvotes. Negative feedback was more likely to be cancelled out by an upvote.
"Our experiment does not reveal the psychology behind people's decisions," Aral told Science, "But an intuitive explanation is that people are more skeptical of negative social influence. They're more willing to go along with positive opinions from other people."
Felix Reed-Tsochas, a professor of social sciences at the University of Oxford, said people also tend to act differently depending on what social media site they are on.
"We are embedded in multiple social networks with many different types of ties," he told ABC News. "It is not necessarily easy to understand how effects that are observed in one environment can be translated to another."
In other words, a Facebook user would get a different reaction to a story than they would on Reddit, and same with photos on Instagram and videos on Vine and so forth. Aral did acknowledge the prominence of user feedback with a real-life example of his own.
"User ratings are the second most important criteria to judge the quality of a product or service, after referrals from friends and family," he said. "I just had a baby and relied on online ratings to narrow down the doctors. That's a significant decision for which ratings matter."
(The author of this article edited an error in attribution at the end of the piece).
