A NEW AI algorithm has concluded that humans are more likely to follow a crowd than think independently.
Aston University computer scientist Dr. Ulysses Bernardet used artificial intelligence (AI) to assess human social behavior.
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Dr. Benardet, along with experts from Belgium and Germany, found evidence that people tend to follow a two-step process when we’re in a crowd.
The team recently published their article, dubbed Evidence for a two-step model of social group influence, in the journal iScience.
Their results showed that humans are more likely to imitate a crowd first and think independently second.
To test their hypothesis the team developed a virtual reality (VR) experiment for 160 participants.
The participants were thrown into a simulated city street, where they were observed watching a movie by 10 AI-generated ‘spectators’.
An algorithm programmed the ‘spectators’ to influence the direction of the gaze of the individual participants.
At the end of the experiment, the results showed that the influence of a crowd basically follows a two-step model.
“Humans demonstrate an initial tendency to follow others – a reflexive, imitative process,” Dr. Bernardet said.
“But this is followed by more deliberate, strategic processes when a person will decide whether to copy others around them, or not.”
