Information cascades are a very specific kind of conformity where each person has their own information about the decision they have to make, and can see what everyone else has done. Eventually, everyone conforms to a certain decision in a perfect model. However, there are those people who will follow their gut and do what they think is right, the so called “individuals”. Almost ironically, it seems that the “people” tend to like these individuals and look up to them. For example, popular presidential candidate Barack Obama is riding on the idea of change, and his surprising success is evidence to this idea. As the article mentions, it is a combination of trust in others and individualism that leads to the best society so trusting in a leader is still a good thing, even though you may be conforming with others.

This article talks about a specific experiment where researchers Hodges and Geyer show a group of people a card with three lines, one being clearly longer than the other. Then they ask everyone what is the longest line, but in the group there are fake participants who will go with a clearly wrong answer. In a classic experiment by Asch, this procedure was run once and most of the time the participant conformed to the group. However, in this new experiment, the procedure was run 18 times, and the person conformed 3 times out of the 12 (they lied 12 times). Fortunately, people are not completely submissive to groups. This demonstrates that with the repetition of an information cascade type experiment, people may start to distrust the crowd and trust themselves based on previous experience, similar to the “practice makes perfect” idea. For example, during the Nazi regime in Germany, many people gave in to the government due to an information cascade. However, there were people that began to realize what was really going on after a while and began protesting it, whether it was hiding someone in danger or trying to flee the country. The point is, if there aren’t people that are willing to stand up for their ideas, then the human society would never last. Thankfully, we are still hanging in there.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/magazine/30wwln-idealab-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin