14 DAY TRIAL // Understanding how trends spread through society has been one of the main goals of social researchers for a long time, because the mechanisms involved in this are apparently extremely complex. Unfortunately, it's not like they can put a GPS tag on a trend and see what happens. So, they turned to the next best thing, the popular online video game Second Life. Surprisingly, the title came through, and offered them some insight into how trends spread like ripples through the water.
One of the questions that most puzzled sociologists was whether people became friends because they had a lot of things in common in the first place, or was it because they were friends that they influenced each other in liking certain things, such as the same food and the same movies. Following this line of reasoning, understanding the importance that social influence plays in the spread of a trend becomes very important, but also impossible to accomplish in real-life.
However, in Second Life, researchers were able to track the spread of “gestures,” which are, in fact, code snippets that avatars in the game need to acquire in order to be able to perform a series of actions that is not standard in the title. They have to be bought from in-game stores, which gave researchers the ability to accurately follow the way in which the gestures, or trends, spread. According to the experts, more than 50 percent of all gestures they'd traced ended up being transmitted throughout the network friend by friend, rather than by making “large leaps” at times.
“We could have found that most everyone goes to the store to buy gestures, but it turns out about 50 percent of gesture transfers are between people who have declared themselves friends. The social networks played a major role in the distribution of these assets,” University of Michigan School of Information and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Assistant Professor Lara Adamic explains. “There's been a high correspondence between the real world and virtual worlds. We're not saying this is exactly how people share in the real world, but we believe it does have some relevance.”
“In our study, we sought to develop a more rigorous understanding of social processes that underlies many cultural and economic phenomena. While some of our findings may seem quite intuitive, what I find most exciting is that we were actually able to test some rather controversial and competing hypotheses about the role of social networks in influence,” UM graduate student Eytan Bakshy concludes.