During the class of week three, Rosanna did
an interesting sociological experiment with us. Although the result did not
come out as what it expected to be, an obvious phenomenon which lies in the
concept of this experiment was shown, which is called the conformist mentality.
To speak briefly, conformist mentality
means that someone tends to alternate his own feeling, judgment or cognition in
order to fit the majority’s choice. Experiments show that most people have
conformist mentality in different situations; however, we can say conformist
mentality is one kind of human nature.
“A social network is a theoretical
construct useful in the social sciences to study relationships between
individuals, groups, organizations, or even entire societies.” According to the
characteristics of social networking, the conformist mentality of common people
is something that network designers should take into consideration. Examples
are already here and there. In mainland China, a website called Dianping.com is
very popular among netizens and smart phones users. In this site you can find
restaurants, KTVs, gyms or any kind of consumption spaces which most customers recommend,
and more detailed comments can be referred to for convenience. Usually the one
with large number of positive comments will attract more potential customers. This
way of advertising sometimes is more useful than detailed introduction. Now it
is easy to see some advertisements of apps with a title of “xxx,xxx,xxx people
are using this app now” on most social network websites, which truly works no
matter the statistics is real or fabricated.
Conformist mentality not always leads you
to the right choice. Many sellers take advantage of this human nature to make
profits dishonestly. When we buy something on an online shopping site like
Amazon.com or Taobao.com, usually we will choose one with a large recently bought
record. Some dishonest shop owners would employ pretended buyers to make its
trade record in order to fascinate more customers. This kind of deceiver not
only breaks down reputation of the website, but also ruins the fair competition
environment. The customers and those newly created shops become victims at
last.
This human nature has its positive and negative
influence. According to my understanding, conformist mentality leads to the
right choice in most times, I don’t think it is a shame to follow the majority
because to be unique is always with risks. But it is better to have your own
feedback, since passive conformity and dependency generates indecisiveness when
someone has to make a choice independently.
