but when 100 people, who may be anonymous, repeatedly say negative things about a product it is more likely it's true.
Tons of research backs up the phenomena you are describing very strongly -- the more you hear something asserted, the more you are likely to believe it.
And i think something needs to be said about this, and this gets back to the reputation issue raised by others.
One of the reasons why companies and politicians pour money into making sure the same sound bites and assertions are fed into your ears over and over and over is to exploit the brain's tendency to believe something when it is repeated often enough.
I think one of the dangers of the increasing ubiquity of cloud/social networking sites and crown opinions, is the potential for companies to exploit this kind of thing in producing under-the-radar campaigns against competitors and to promote their own products.
Even absent these kinds of paid campaigns, there is a whole field of research on what DC member alex3f calls "
information cascades" where you get a kind of arbitrary snowball effect of crowd opinions that can lead to some very misleading group preferences.
Recent Posts
