Facebook users 'still display herd instinct'

Technology may have moved on but it seems people cannot shake off the herding instinct, a study of 50 million Facebook users found.

The Oxford University-led research looked at the rate at which members of the networking site added software applications, known as apps, to their pages, and found social influence had a large role to play.

Analysing the anonymous data, the researchers found people display a herding instinct, making them want to use the same product as others, but only once it has reached a certain level of popularity.

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Dr Felix Reed-Tsochas from Oxford University's Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, said: "Users only appear to be influenced by the choices of other users above a certain level of popularity, and at that point, popularity drives future popularity.

"Below this threshold, the effects of social influence are imperceptible. Because popularity seems to depend mainly on the choices of others in the community, rather than intrinsic characteristics of the applications themselves, it does not appear possible to predict which applications will succeed and which will fail ahead of time."

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