Abstract

The world presents far more information than people have the capacity to examine. As a result, humans have evolved to use cognitive heuristics to decide quickly what information to pay attention to. For example, people pay more attention to items near the top of a list than those below [Payne 1951]. A consequence of this cognitive heuristic, called position bias, is the strong effect the presentation order—item ranking—has on individual choices. It affects which items in a list of search results users click on [Buscher et al. 2009], and the answer they select in response to multiple choice questions [Blunch 1984]. Another common cognitive heuristic is social influence: people pay attention to the choices of others. Social influence affects most daily decisions, such as what to buy and who to vote for. Studies showed that social influence biases individual judgements [Salganik et al. 2006; Muchnik et al. 2013], creating an “irrational herding” effect that can obscure the underlying quality of choices. Cognitive heuristics also play an important role online, where rapid proliferation of user-generated content makes it difficult to identify high-quality items. Since people often do not have time or energy to evaluate all available choices, they may rely on the opinions of others. Crowdsourcing, peer recommendation, and markets are some of the mechanisms for aggregating individual decisions into a collective opinion, which can help individuals identify high-quality items. The choices content providers make about how and what information to display to users has a profound effect on collective behavior. For instance, the choice of how to rank items shown to users can …

Date

February 7, 2026

Authors

KRISTINA LERMAN, T Hogg

Journal

Collective Intelligence