Author Manuscript NIHPA Author Manuscript NIHPA Author ManuscriptExperimental SetupParticipants for our
Author Manuscript NIHPA Author Manuscript NIHPA Author ManuscriptExperimental SetupParticipants for our experiment have been recruited by sending emails to participants from a earlier, unrelated experiment (Dodds et al. 2003). These emails, and the added webpostings they generated, yielded 2,207 participants, the majority of which lived in the Usa and have been between the ages of eight and 34 (Table ). Our experiment ran from March four, 2005 to August 0, 2005 (2 weeks), and throughout that time we recorded a slight raise inside the fraction of female participants and a rise within the proportion of participants from Brazil; however, it does not seem that either of these demographic shifts affected our results. Due to the fact the experiment was webbased, we had significantly less control more than participant recruitment and behavior than in labbased experiments (Skitka and Sargis 2006). As such we took many distinct steps, described more totally in the appendix, to account for possible data top quality troubles. Upon arriving at our web-site, participants have been presented having a welcome screen informing them that they had been about to take part in a study of musical tastes and that in exchange for participating they would be provided a chance to download some cost-free songs by upandcoming artists. Next, subjects provided informed consent,two filled out a short survey, and had been shown a page of instructions. Finally, subjects were presented with a menu of 48 songs presented within a vertical column, related for the layout of common music sites (MedChemExpress Trovirdine Figure A).three Having chosen to listen to a song, they were asked to rate it on a scale of star (“I hate it”) to 5 stars (“I love it”) (Figure B), soon after which they had been provided the opportunity to download the song2The study protocols utilized were approved by the Columbia University Institutional Assessment Board (protocol numbers: IRBAAAA5286 and IRBAAAB483).Soc Psychol Q. Author manuscript; accessible in PMC 203 September 27.Salganik and WattsPage(Figure C). Because of the design and style of our web-site, participants could only download a song following listening to and rating it. Even so, they could listen to, price, and download PubMed ID:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22513895 as many or as handful of songs as they wished. Upon arrival to the web-site, subjects have been randomly assigned into certainly one of numerous experimental groups. During an initial setup phase, 2,2 participants had been assigned to among two “worlds”4independent and social influencewhich differed in the readily available facts regarding the behavior of other participants that was presented together with the songs. In the social influence world, the songs have been sorted from most to least well known and accompanied by the amount of previous downloads for every single song. Within the independent planet, nevertheless, the songs had been randomly reordered for every single participant and weren’t accompanied by any measure of reputation. Therefore, though the presence or absence of download counts was not emphasized, the selections of participants within the social influence situation could clearly be influenced by the options of previous participants, whereas no such influence was feasible inside the independent world. After this setup period, throughout which the recognition ordering in the songs, as measured by download counts, reached an approximate steadystate, we continued to assign subjects towards the social influence and independent planet, but also made two new social influence worlds (the cause we produced two will grow to be clear shortly). In these new worlds we explored the possibility of selffulfilling prophecies by i.