"Social Proof" is the label for a commonly experienced human behavior: individuals often outsource decision-making to the crowd. It is a mental shortcut. It replaces "doing your own research".
Oftentimes it is useful.
You are in an unfamiliar town and you are looking for a good restaurant. You know from past experiences that there are restaurants where the service is bad, where the food is overpriced, where the portions are too small, or where the building wouldn't pass a health inspection. You are hoping to avoid any of that.
Do you have time to visit the local health department? To gather employment records from each establishment to discern relative employee turn-over rates? To order a small portion of french fries at each spot in order to rank them on taste and value?
No.
You drive past several restaurants and reject the ones with too few cars in their parking lots. If you have a smart phone, you get onto Google maps and search "restaurants near me" and when the map pops up, you look at the customer ratings for each. You find one that is 4.8 stars and off you go.
Either way, you just outsourced your decision to the crowd because your brain figures the majority is always correct.
But what about the downside? Does social proof always steer us in the right direction?
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