Herding, social influence and expert opinion

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impact of social influences on opinion formation among academics and other experts. Some social influences are valuable – for example, replicating results is a valuable aspect of scientific research and if a hypothesis has genuinely been verified across a range of different studies, then that may be because it is more probable. In uncertain situations, however, people employ heuristics and rules of thumb to guide their interpretation of events, and this can create problems of cognitive bias, including group biases when beliefs tend to coincide with the prior opinions of others, thus creating herding and path dependency. This tendency to follow others may be magnified by other social influences including reputation-building and conformity preference. Insights about herding and social influence are used to build a model of relative rewards to consensus versus contrarianism. This paper concludes with an analysis of implications and policies designed to moderate the negative herding externalities.

Keywords:

• herding
• social influence
• behavioral bias
• expert opinion

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Erratum

Notes

This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see erratum(http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1350178X.2013.791505)

1. See Surowiecki (2005) for an introductory survey of the literature.

2. See Dwyer, Arlington et al. (1993) for an analysis of competing theories.