Something about the activity on the class of week three

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.