An experimental study of opinion influenceability

Humans, like many other animal species, often make choices under social influence. Experiments in ants and fishes have shown that individuals choose according to estimations of which option to take given private and social information. Principled approaches based on probabilistic estimations by agents give mathematical formulas explaining experiments in these species. Here we test whether the same principled approaches can explain social influence in humans. We conduct a large online field experiment in which we measure opinion influenced by public comments about short movies in the most popular video-sharing website. We show that the basic principles of social influence in other species also apply to humans, with the added complexity that humans are heterogenous. We infer influenceability of each participant of the experiment, finding that individuals prone to social influence tend to agree with social feedback, read less comments, and are less educated than the persons who resist influence. We believe that our results will help to build a mathematical theory of social influence rooted in probabilistic reasoning that show commonalities and differences between humans and other species.