From the various examples cited in class, we have seen that information cascades are a very real, and in some cases dangerous, phenomenon. The danger, of course, comes from the fact that in a cascade, people willfully ignore any signal that the choice they are about to make may be incorrect. This conformism, although beneficial in a few cases, is especially damaging in fields which require a fair amount of skepticism. In this post, I will discuss an article studying how statements about molecular interactions that can be found in biological texts vary over time. The question to ask is this: to what extent are such declarations based on blind faith to what has been said before?

For this study, a model was developed to describe how the statements being described get published. There are various parameters involved, such as the probability of encountering an experimental error, or the “momentum” that a prior statement might have an effect on a later statement. But the end result is a model flexible enough to capture the various forms of behavior that might be observed. Using this model, the parameters for the problem were then estimated using a Monte Carlo method and the results analyzed.

As one might expect, the researchers found that there is indeed a positive momentum that reinforces conformism to statements that had been made in the past. However, the estimated parameters seem to indicate that each past statement has ten times less influence than the scientist’s own signal. Thus, although information cascades can and do occur in such published statements, the effect is not as apparent as some of the examples discussed in class.

Nevertheless, the article goes on to state that these reinforcing momentum values, although relatively small, are still much too high to maximize the probability of converging to the correct result. This, of course, is despite the fact that scientists are already very skeptical by nature! Perhaps if there’s one thing we can learn from this study, it’s that everyone, biologist or otherwise, can always afford to be a little more skeptical in our daily life.