Well, think about it. Nobody wanted to use the shopping cart, until Goldman hired fake shoppers.
And suddenly, it caught on.
This little, trivial piece of shopping trivia says so much about how easy the public is to manipulate through deception.
What else does this work for? Are there fake shoppers in play now? Are there other types of fakes, that convince people something is common practice, even if it never was? Fake reviewers. Fake posters on message boards?
I mean, all it took was hiring a bunch of paid shills? Really?
__________________ What CDTM believes;
Never let anyone else define you. Don't be a jerk just to be a jerk, but if you are expressing your true inner feelings and beliefs, or at least trying to express that inner child, and everyone gets pissed off about it, never NEVER apologize for it. Let them think what they want, let them define you in their narrow little minds while they suppress every last piece of them just to keep a friend that never liked them for themselves in the first place.
If you are fascinated with that cdtm go check out Edward Bernays father of modern propaganda...I mean marketing and his ability to manipulate the masses with group psychology.
It's how a lot of shit on reddit is upvoted/downvoted. The hive mind on the internet is real.
I did a paper on manipulation of voting in online social media a few years ago and used reddit as my "subject."
I created multiple accounts. The primary account was the 'target for voting influence.' And the secondary accounts were used just for voting.
And I used a control account.
Here's what I did and proved:
I could post the same exact comment on the same exact content BUT if I upvoted it into the positive, it got upvoted by the reddit hive mind.
If I downvoted it into the negative, it was downvoted by redditors.
Same comment. On the same content. I would repeat this for reposts, as well.
At first I thought it was just due to the time of day or day of the week. Nope. It held true regardless of the content. I repeated this on so many different pieces of content that the data showed an extremely strong correlation between upvoted and downvoted influence. if a redditor comes across content that is already upvoted, they are more likely to upvote.
The content had to be new/trending, however, to get enough eyes for voting purposes.
The effect was even more pronounced when it exceeded 5 votes positive or negative but the effect was much more pronounced on the positive part of influencing voting (meaning, if a comment was downvoted -5 by me, it generally didn't drop far much further but if a comment was upvoted by +5, it could see hundreds or even thousands of upvotes by the time it was out of most people's eyes (via reddit's sorting algorithms for "hot" and "trending" content)).
So what does this tell you? Humans are social creatures. Very social. Highly influenced by what others say around them. More cynically, this tells us that humans, in general, and dumb pieces of shit.
So, yes, the cart thing works under the same mechanism as the upvoting and downvoting things works: if others are doing this thing, it must be okay to do it. It kept our ancestors alive long enough to pass on their genes that carried the ability to pick up social cues on behavior. So you can mock it or think it is creepy/spooky. But it is really just a species preservation trait. It's part of what made humans so resilient and survivable. Not robust. Not at all. Survivable and resilient.
I get what you're saying, but I think my main problem with this mechanism, is it depends on a robust ethical system, that is enforced at the top. Otherwise, it can lead to all sorts cult like exploitations.
As we're seeing now with all the sexual allegations. Recent events seem to suggest a moral code simply does not exist.
Which is, to me, a scary thing. Like, Nazi Germany scary.
__________________ What CDTM believes;
Never let anyone else define you. Don't be a jerk just to be a jerk, but if you are expressing your true inner feelings and beliefs, or at least trying to express that inner child, and everyone gets pissed off about it, never NEVER apologize for it. Let them think what they want, let them define you in their narrow little minds while they suppress every last piece of them just to keep a friend that never liked them for themselves in the first place.
No doubt, look at the weird gender politics and the weird far-right rise. Two sides of the same thing, manipulation of the stupid. Even Trump's Election.
Reading the title I figured this would just be about American colleges.
__________________ Chicken Boo, what's the matter with you? You don't act like the other chickens do. You wear a disguise to look like human guys, but you're not a man you're a Chicken Boo.
This is basically just marketing, dude. Perceptual change is not easy. Influencers are just one of the tools that are used.
And also, from what I've read about it, those "shoppers" were basically just models used to make change the stigma about shopping carts being "like a baby cart (for women)/effeminate(for men). I think they functioned more like shopping mannequines that pushed the cart around just to show people it didn't look bad (he also used greeters to explain the use of the cart). Basically, an "explain and demostrate to change perception" campaign.