When you’re looking for suggestions where do you start first?
If you’re like most people you begin with friends, family, and your immediate network. After that, you might check out online reviews from critics, experts or people who have previously purchased an item or visited a location. Where you probably don’t start is a business’ website or the ads you see online, on television, or hear on the radio.
Companies know this, Yelp carefully monitors its reviews for authenticity, Amazon.com has started taking steps to verify product feedback, and company websites produce and pay for articles that don’t even market their products in order to build a trusting relationship for future sales.
Trust is important, and the stronger it is the less we second-guess. If a friend tells us about the best new microwave to buy we’re less likely to continue our search and instead take their word for it. On the other hand, if we’re searching online and see an advertisement for a self-proclaimed ‘best’ microwave or an unverified review that seems a little too positive we disregard it and keep moving. Part of why this is the case is because we believe our friends have our best interests at heart while a company is looking to make a sale. There’s also more social currency for your friend to lose by giving you bad advice or shilling for a company with a product they don’t believe in.
Described in Jonah Berger’s book Contagious, social currency is the social clout held and spent among friends and communities through various activities including the sharing of valuable information. It is the primary driver for our confidence in suggestions from our network and acts to ensure that trust is not broken at the cost of that valuable social currency.
In our last article, we looked at how lists help us organize a world with too much information, but where you get your lists matter almost as much as the list itself for aiding decision making. Consider the WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is) effect we discussed previously and how lists cap the amount of information our brains seek to gather and protect us from analysis paralysis. When you get a list of suggestions from a friend that effect can come more easily, whereas suggestions (or even a single suggestion) from an untrusted source introduces another factor to our decision making that causes us to ask if they have something else to gain from the information provided. This nagging thought derails the WYSIATI effect bringing your mind out of the focus the list provides and towards other possibilities or even other lists.
This is why when it comes to suggestions, singular or in a list, trust is key. When we trust we don’t question and when we don’t question we find it easier to decide.
So when finding or building a list start with those you trust the most, the closer you stay to sources you’re comfortable with the more useful your list will be.
But there is more to making a list useful than trust. In our next article, we’ll examine what to look for in a list or how to build one for yourself.
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