The chief of Instagram has decided to hide ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ in the apps next update. They’re saying that the reason for this is to ease up on the pressure you feel of how many likes you get on a post versus how many likes someone else may have on a post. They started with testing it on Twitter first by hiding the likes on tweets and the retweets on tweets. By doing that experiment, they found that people engage less when they couldn’t see the numbers on the posts.
This article is very short, but I chose it because it reminded me of some aspects in psychology that I thought were really cool. Online and on social media, people tend to jump on board with the hottest or most popular thing and that’s for a lot of aspects of our lives. The fact that people engaged less because they couldn’t see the numbers says a lot about the mind and cognitive processes. This reminded me of the “Bandwagon Effect”. The Bandwagon Effect is a psychological phenomenon where people do something only because others are doing it. With the likes and retweets and numbers up, people can see just how popular a post is and have a higher chance of liking or re-posting due to the high numbers. Maybe people tend to ignore posts that have lower numbers, too. If the numbers are gone, everybody engaging on social media can like whatever they like with their own unbiased and unwavering opinions.