Does knowing how many users interacted with a story, photo, or a blog post, influence your judgment on whether to like/dislike it? Are the likes and comments economy creating a bias in our responses?

I wanted to talk about the power of user experience design and how it has this dynamic, vivid ability to transform a product (for better or good) – simply by envisioning it’s interactions differently. For example; A social media domain adopting an unbiased subjectivity for users and how they may interact with individual items by concealing the likes/dislikes.

Users can engage with other’s posts without having to know the creator, no.of views, likes &/or comments – hence not being influenced to whether like, comment, or follow the user.

“Regardless of whether the inquiry is how to manage an unfilled popcorn enclose a cinema, how quick to drive on a specific stretch of thruway, or how to eat the chicken at an evening gathering, the activities of everyone around us will be significant in characterizing the appropriate response.” –  Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert Cialdini.

There is a heuristic the majority of us use to figure out what to do, think, say, and purchase: the standard of social evidence. To realize what is right, we are influenced by what other users are doing.

Asch’s conformity experiment also draws a similar conclusion in a different setting, where users may be influenced by social pressure from a majority group to conform to a rule.

Hence it is important to understand that tools such as likes/dislikes, comments, subscriptions, followers, etc may be a digital currency to resonate with the individual’s status, yet these are prone to bias and false interpretation.