When you “like” a content posted on Facebook, you are making your friends imitate you and do it too, even when they don't like or approve of what you've written. In the opposite case, the same does not happen: a negative response to published content does not trigger a negative reaction from the rest of the readers. These are the conclusions of a new study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the mimetic behavior of users of the social network Facebook.
According to scientists, a small sample of agreement under a text triggers a wave of approval due to the expectation it generates . The experiment consisted of analyzing the feedback ratings of the comments on a news web page, in which readers could point a finger up or a finger down according to their agreement or disagreement. The team manipulated the votes by arbitrarily distributing "I like" and "I don't like it" in the comments that were being published by users.
The results showed that readers were 30 percent more likely to vote positively if they found a previous "Like" . Comments that had that initial false vote ended up with a higher number of positive votes. However, this trend was not manifested in the negatively voted comments, which maintained the same number of votes as the control group comments.
Researchers attribute these conclusions to the theory of "cumulative advantage" according to which popularity is decisive when something looks good or of quality to us.
