[MUSIC]
We've long known that social effects are very important in a number of settings.
Education.
Purchase behavior as well but what we didn't have was
one particular setting where we could clearly measure the effect.
And airlines are very interesting for this because
especially during flights when you think about it's like we have a lab in the sky.
We have a number of computers.
We have people sitting in front of those computers where they can order food and
drinks and movies and on top of that,
they're observing their neighbors behaviors and so it's very easy,
it's a very nice setting to identify social effects when you're flying.
[MUSIC]
The airline setting has a lot of advantages.
And one of them is the following.
Imagine you're trying to look for social effects in consumption,
for example, in a supermarket.
In a supermarket there are so many things going on.
There's so many stimulators, so many price promotions, there's so
many trials, and so it's very hard to know whether that particular person influenced
another one in such a very complicated environment.
And so one of the nice things about this setting, of the airline setting,
is that we can actually distinguish what simply what we call spatial correlation,
and just the fact that maybe people in the front of a flight, for example,
are more likely to have drinks than people sitting in the back of an airplane.
We can distinguish that from what's really social influence.
So the nice thing about this seating arrangement,
is that you're much more likely to see what people to your sides are doing,
then people, say in the back, are doing.
And so, what we ended up doing was to compare
the behavior of pairs of people, who are sitting one in front of the other.
And the person in the back, actually, had a neighbor buy.
But the person it the front didn't.
So what does that do?
Well these two people are only separated by one row.
They're also either middle seat or the window seat or the aisle seat.
They're in the same type of seat.
They're going to the same place coming from the same place.
So they're bound to be very similar in some regards.
But the main difference is that one of them had the lateral
passenger buy something.
Where the person in front, well for
that person, it's much harder to see that passenger.
And so that was the identification strategy for the paper, and
that talks to why this setting is so good to look at social effects.
[MUSIC]
So the basic study was investigating what people buy when they're flying.
So they buy movies.
They buy drinks.
They buy food items and
especially see what would happen to their neighbors after that purchase.
So our focus was actually on the neighbors of purchasers.
We would see if they would be more likely to buy than other passengers
that had not been influenced by their neighbors and
what we found was that, in fact, there were social effects.
So there was a lot going on in terms of a passenger's
purchase influencing the behavior of the others.
[MUSIC]
And so how is it that someone is influencing someone else?
Is it just awareness?
Oh, I hadn't thought about but now I see someone next to me buy,that looks good so
maybe I'll get the same type of food, for example.
Or could it be more information.
For example, I haven't seen a certain movie but
I see that the person next to me is watching this particular movie.
Maybe that tells me something about the quality of the movie.
It's not so much an awareness.
Are there movies on board?
I know they are showing movies on board, But there may be some information about
the quality of the goods that are being served.
And so what we found there is actually most of it,
it seems to be related to awareness, not so much quality inference,
perse, but it's more like it seems to be a more primary motivation.
Oh, I saw something and it looks delicious.
It's smelling very good.
And so, now I'm actually hungry and I want to get something to eat as well.
It seems to be more at the instinct level and
less of a rational decision in terms of mimicking others.
[MUSIC]
When we looked at people who had already bought, those people are actually
interesting because they already revealed that they like buying stuff on board,
that they may appreciate a movie.
During a flight, for example.
So what we wanted to know there was whether these people could be more easily
influenced by their neighbors given that they already had
revealed that they had a strong preference for the product.
That was very defining because we actually found that these people are systematically
much more responsive to social effects than others.
[MUSIC]
What we found was that once we investigated people who were flying with
other people, so basically groups flying, there the influence is much, much higher.
What I mean by that is, suppose we find someone who bought and
likes buying things during a flight, it turns out that the other people in
the group are also very responsive to social effect.
Usually the saying goes that birds of a feather, flock together, and so even in
flights, people who have similar tastes are more likely to be flying together.
And that's a pattern that we find in our data, so
groups, families, they're likely to have the same tastes.
And that's very valuable information for marketers because that means that if I
can identify one of these groups, say in the flight it could be a particular
family that is very willing to buy things on board,
well now I can identify a number of people who are interested in my product.
[MUSIC]
The striking figure is 30%.
The average passenger is 30% more likely to buy something.
If they see their lateral neighbor buy, so
that's the main finding and we never thought it would be so high.
Actually, that increase can go to 100%.
What that means is that the purchase rate
of a given passenger can as much double if they see someone next to them buy.