As I looked for an article related to network effects, information cascade, and related topics, I searched for articles related to collective behavior, and found this interesting article by B. E. Aguirre, E.L. Quarantelli, and Jorge L. Mendoza. The link is located below:

http://www.udel.edu/DRC/Aguirre/publications/ag32.pdf

The article is entitled, “The Collective Behavior of Fads: The Characteristics, Effects, and Career of Streaking.” It is a little old, first published in 1988, but I still found it very interesting and very applicable to the things that we are discussing in class.

The paper looks into the fad of streaking as if occurred on college campuses across the United States in the spring of 1974. The authors took data that had been collected in 1977 from 1,076 colleges and universities regarding incidents of streaking in the spring of 1974, then they looked at literature that discussed the characteristics, effects, and career of fads, and tried to see how the data matched the literature.

The authors looked at five different factors that they felt would affect the adoption of streaking at a particular school,(1) prestige of nearby schools at which streaking had occurred, (2) sanctions that had been brought against streakers, (3) mass media attention given to streaking, (4) complexity and heterogeneity, e.g. how many students participated, were there both males and female participants, etc., (5) and school heterogeneity. They then hypothesized that (1)the greater the prestige of nearby schools with streaking, the greater the chance a students at a particular school would adopt streaking, (2) the harsher the sanctions brought against streakers, the less inclined students would be to streak, (3) the greater the mass media attention to streaking, the more inclined students would be to adopt it, (4) the more complex and heterogeneous the streaking events were, the more inclined other schools would be to follow, and (5) the more heterogeneous the school, the more inclined it would be to adopt streaking.

The authors found that all of their hypotheses held true, except for the 2nd one. They found the opposite, the harsher the punishments, the more students were inclined to participate in streaking.

The authors concluded that their results supported the idea that fads are a type of “diffuse collectivity”, made up of both “diffuse and compact” groups, which I interpreted to mean they existed in a “small-world” social network. They conclude that fads cannot be dismissed as “aberrant, inconsequential, and irrational” since they are collective behavior, and their study can provide insight into all form of social movements.

The study of fads ties in very interestingly into our current study of network effects and information cascade. Fads are also discussed in length in “The Tipping Point”, and Malcolm Gladwell writes qualitatively about some of the factors that affect fads. This paper presented a much more quantitative model.