orgtheory.net

Perhaps no sociological idea is more prominent than the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy.  The idea is that false beliefs lead to affirming outcomes as individuals change their behavior to conform with the false belief.  The concept seems to have particular relevance when considering cultural markets. Good music is often overlooked in favor of consumption of bad music (hello, American Idol!), it is believed, because clever marketers have figured how to create positive buzz for the bad music, boosting the perceived quality of the music.  Once a number of individuals in the market believe a cultural good is of high quality, others act on that information as if the quality distinction were real, causing the good to become more popular and cementing the perception of real quality.  Even the least cynical music consumer will admit that this explanation is not completely wrong.

In a study published in the most recent issue of Social Pscyhology Quarterly Matthew Salganik and Duncan Watts test the idea of self-fulfilling prophecy in music popularity using a clever online experimental design.  They use a control group to rate various songs that subjects listen to and then decide whether to download.  Using this independent group’s number of listens and downloads as measures of actual quality, S&W can then assess whether quality assessments (based on number of downloads) differ in experimental groups where subjects are exposed to social influence.  In the social influence groups subjects can see download rankings and can use those rankings as signals of song quality.  If self-fulfilling prophecy is at work, you would expect even poor songs to have more downloads when they are ranked high on the download list.  To see if that holds, S&W created an inverted ranking  in which the worst songs (as rated by the independent subjects) are placed at the top of the download rankings list and the best songs are at the bottom.

The results aren’t quite what you’d expect.  Highly ranked songs tend to generate more listens but so do the lowest ranked songs.  Songs in the middle of the ranking get the fewest listens.  The ranking system itself, at both ends of the distribution, appears to increase the salience of a song.  But the study does confirm that inversing the rankings has an effect on popularity.  Poor songs that were ranked on the high end in the inverted rankings tend on average to get more downloads than they did in the independent group, but they also found that “good” songs were able to overcome ranking placement.  Good songs at the bottom of inverse rankings tended to recover their position over time.  The study also points out another limit to self-fulfilling prophecy.  While inverting the rankings helped some poor songs improve their fortunes, inversing the rankings seemed to negatively affect the collective popularity of songs.  Because participants in the inverted world were exposed to  more poor songs, they tended to download fewer songs than in the independent world.  This finding, I think, is really interesting because it shows that while you can affect the fortune of any single song through cultural engineering, over the top efforts to control consumers’ preferences may have a damaging effect on the overall appeal of the market.  Here is S&W’s summary:

We are able to show, for example, that although inversion of market information can lead to substantial differences in the success of individual songs, the effect on the overall market ranking was not as dramatic as we had anticipated—many “good” songs recouped much of their original popularity in spite of our manipulation. Our experiment therefore provides some ammunition both for proponents of self-fulfilling prophecies, and also for skeptics, by suggesting that cultural markets can exhibit self-fulfilling prophecies, but that their effects may be limited by preexisting individual preferences (351, emphasis mine).