Author Manuscript NIHPA Author Manuscript NIHPA Author ManuscriptExperimental SetupParticipants for our
Author Manuscript NIHPA Author Manuscript NIHPA Author ManuscriptExperimental SetupParticipants for our experiment were recruited by sending emails to participants from a earlier, unrelated experiment (Dodds et al. 2003). These emails, plus the added webpostings they generated, yielded two,207 participants, the majority of which lived within the Usa and have been between the ages of eight and 34 (Table ). Our experiment ran from March 4, 2005 to August 0, 2005 (2 weeks), and during that time we recorded a slight improve within the fraction of female participants and a rise in the proportion of participants from Brazil; however, it does not seem that either of these demographic shifts SGI-7079 site impacted our outcomes. For the reason that the experiment was webbased, we had less manage more than participant recruitment and behavior than in labbased experiments (Skitka and Sargis 2006). As such we took several precise methods, described extra completely inside the appendix, to account for possible information good quality issues. Upon arriving at our web page, participants had been presented using a welcome screen informing them that they have been about to take part in a study of musical tastes and that in exchange for participating they will be given a possibility to download some free of charge songs by upandcoming artists. Next, subjects offered informed consent,two filled out a brief survey, and have been shown a web page of instructions. Finally, subjects have been presented using a menu of 48 songs presented within a vertical column, comparable for the layout of well-known music internet sites (Figure A).three Possessing selected to listen to a song, they had been asked to price it on a scale of star (“I hate it”) to 5 stars (“I like it”) (Figure B), just after which they have been offered the opportunity to download the song2The study protocols made use of had been authorized by the Columbia University Institutional Assessment Board (protocol numbers: IRBAAAA5286 and IRBAAAB483).Soc Psychol Q. Author manuscript; offered in PMC 203 September 27.Salganik and WattsPage(Figure C). Due to the design and style of our web site, participants could only download a song right after listening to and rating it. Even so, they could listen to, price, and download PubMed ID:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22513895 as quite a few or as few songs as they wished. Upon arrival towards the web-site, subjects were randomly assigned into among quite a few experimental groups. Throughout an initial setup phase, two,2 participants were assigned to one of two “worlds”4independent and social influencewhich differed in the out there facts in regards to the behavior of other participants that was presented with all the songs. Inside the social influence planet, the songs were sorted from most to least popular and accompanied by the number of previous downloads for each and every song. Inside the independent planet, nonetheless, the songs were randomly reordered for each participant and were not accompanied by any measure of popularity. Thus, even though the presence or absence of download counts was not emphasized, the selections of participants inside the social influence condition could clearly be influenced by the possibilities of earlier participants, whereas no such influence was feasible inside the independent globe. Following this setup period, through which the popularity ordering of your songs, as measured by download counts, reached an approximate steadystate, we continued to assign subjects for the social influence and independent globe, but in addition created two new social influence worlds (the reason we developed two will grow to be clear shortly). In these new worlds we explored the possibility of selffulfilling prophecies by i.