

A tale of two coffee machines - Weapon of Influence in action - JarekS
http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/03/tale-of-two-coffee-machines-weapon-of.html

======
pawartur
I think that this Social Proof is one of the most important factors we take
under consideration, also in the internet - how often do you check google
search results that are not on one of the first three pages?

And in this case it is also not hard to show that such behaviour is not a
winning strategy, if you want to maximalize your chance to make the best
choice. But still it seems to be a winning strategy, if you want to avoid
making the worst one.

I think the catch here is that people tend to think that they in fact want to
make best choices and not just avoid the worst ones.

~~~
JarekS
Social Proof is one of the most important automatisms we use everyday. Yet I
don't agree that it makes sense to use it to avoid making worst decisions.

Last weeks of Bull market on stock exchange is the best example of the
situation where people follow Social Proof and at the same time they are
making worst possible thing (buying overpriced stock).

~~~
pawartur
I agree that it's a very good example that following Social Proof can be
misleading, but I still think it makes sense as a strategy to minimalize the
risk of making a very bad decision. I realize that it's preety vague ant thus
not exceptionally interesting point though :).

Actually, you can even point out that a decision made by the majority can't be
the worst one in a social sense and I don't think it's completely stupid -
after all, if you're in a social group and don't know what to do, it's always
good to make sure that you won't end up worse that the majority since it
happens quite seldom that the majority ends up very bad.

------
pbhjpbhj
Summary: an anecdote about a hotel dining room with 2 bean-to-cup coffee
machines. One exposes the beans so that users can see it is fresh ground, the
other does not. A queue forms for the explicitly fresh coffee whilst the other
machine remains largely unused.

Hypotheses: we are pack followers, we like to _see_ our coffee is fresh.

