Inevitably Influenced by Others: Adam Waytz on Expertise and “Social Influence Bias”
This Pacific Standard Magazine piece by Northwestern University psychologist and business-school professor Adam Waytz makes two basic points: that expertise has become nearly irrelevant in modern society and that, at the same time, crowdsourced opinions seem to be ascendant. He cites useful research to bolster each point, but taints his argument with “good-old-days” type nostalgia. Where I agree, that is, that the opinions of “experts” are becoming increasingly insignificant to ever larger groups of people and that crowdsourced opinions tend to cluster, it doesn’t necessarily follow that expert opinions have only recently come to resemble everything else in popular culture or on the Internet. One need only examine any instance where there has been a critical consensus on an artist, an album, whatever. How does that consensus emerge? Surely, it can’t simply be because the critics all agree, “objectively,” on the value or worthlessness of something. When I wrote about critics’ lazy comparisons several years back, I wasn’t discovering a new phenomenon. It seems more likely, then, that even experts have long been tuned in to one another, if not also to public opinion. In that sense, what Waytz identifies is likely a difference not in kind, but of degree. Click through, however, and read his piece for yourself. Your thoughts might not be influenced by mine.