BANDWAGON EFFECT

The bandwagon effect is a well documented form of groupthink in behavioral science and has many applications. The general rule is that conduct or beliefs spread among people, as fads and trends clearly do, with "the probability of any individual adopting it increasing with the proportion that have already done so". As more people come to believe in something, others also "hop on the bandwagon" regardless of the underlying evidence. The tendency to follow the actions or beliefs of others can occur because individuals directly prefer to conform, or because individuals derive information from others. Both explanations have been used for evidence of conformity in psychological experiments. For example, social pressure has been used to explain Asch's conformity experiments, and information has been used to explain Sheriffs auto kinetic experiment.

THE CONCEPT In laymans term the bandwagon effect refers to people doing certain things because other people are doing them, regardless of their own beliefs, which they may ignore or override. The perceived "popularity" of an object or person may have an effect on how it is viewed on a whole. For instance, once a product becomes popular, more people tend to "get on the bandwagon" and buy it, too. The bandwagon effect has wide implications, but is commonly seen in politics, consumer and social behavior. This effect is noticed and followed very much by youth, where for instance if people see many of their friends buying a particular phone, they could become more interested in buying that product. When individuals make rational choices based on the information they receive from others, economists have proposed that information cascades can quickly form in which people decide to ignore their personal information signals and follow the behavior of others. Cascades explain why behavior is fragilepeople understand that they are based on very limited information. As a result, fads form easily but are also easily dislodged. Such informational effects have been used to explain political bandwagons.
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ORIGIN OF THE PHRASE Literally, a bandwagon is a wagon which carries the band in a parade, circus or other entertainment. The phrase "jump on the bandwagon" first appeared in American politics in 1848 when Dan Rice, a famous and popular circus clown of the time, used his bandwagon and its music to gain attention for his political campaign appearances. As his campaign became more successful, other politicians strove for a seat on the bandwagon, hoping to be associated with his success. Later, during the time of William Jennings Bryan's 1900 presidential campaign, bandwagons had become standard in campaigns, and "jump on the bandwagon" was used as a derogatory term, implying that people were associating themselves with the success without considering what they associated themselves with. USE IN MICROECONOMICS In microeconomics, bandwagon effect describes interactions of demand and preference. The bandwagon effect arises when people's preference for a commodity increases as the number of people buying it increases. This interaction potentially disturbs the normal results of the theory of supply and demand, which assumes that consumers make buying decisions solely based on price and their own personal preference. The fashion industry is a good example of the way our taste is manipulated for profit and how Madison Avenue influences our tastes. With the help of Madison Avenue stylists create a bandwagon effect which makes us feel uncomfortable if we do not conform to the current dress code. Gary Becker has even argued that the bandwagon effect could be so strong as to make the demand curve slope upward. A further explanation of the bandwagon effect in new products adoption (marketing) could lay in the "relative" performance of the adopters, versus the people remaining with the established solution. If the innovation creates a value added capable to shift the ranking of the adopter within a group of Customers, when the adopter improves his own ranking, he will worsen everyone else's ranking. This creates for the remaining an incentive to switch to the innovation. (This concept is adapted from "the Art of strategy - Dixit, Nalebuff - pg 271, 2)

USE IN POLITICS The bandwagon effect occurs in voting: some people vote for those candidates or parties who are likely to succeed (or are proclaimed as such by the media), hoping to be on the "winner's side" in the end. The bandwagon effect has been applied to situations involving majority opinion, such as political outcomes, where people alter their opinions to the majority view (McAllister and Studlar 721). Such a shift in opinion can occur because individuals draw inferences from the decisions of others, as in an informational cascade. Because of time zones, election results are broadcast in the eastern parts of the United States while polls are still open in the west. This difference has led to research on how the behavior of voters in western United States is influenced by news about the decisions of voters in other time zones. In 1980, NBC News declared Ronald Reagan to be the winner of the presidential race on the basis of the exit polls several hours before the voting booths closed in the west. It is also said to be important in the American Presidential Primary elections. States all vote at different times, spread over some months, rather than all on one day. Some states (Iowa, New Hampshire) have special precedence to go early while others have to wait until a certain date. This is often said to give undue influence to these states, a win in these early states is said to give a candidate the "Big Mo" (momentum) and has propelled many candidates to win the nomination. Because of this, other states often try front loading (going as early as possible) to make their say as influential as they can. In the 2008 presidential primaries two states had all or some of their delegates banned from the convention by the central party organizations for voting too early. Several studies have tested this theory of the bandwagon effect in political decision making. In the 1994 study of Robert K. Goidel and Todd G. Shields in The Journal of Politics, 180 students at the University of Kentucky were randomly assigned to nine groups and were asked questions about the same set of election scenarios. About 70% of subjects received information about the expected winner (Goidel and Shields 807). Independents, which are those who do not vote based on the endorsement of any party and are ultimately neutral, were influenced strongly in favor of the person expected to win (Goidel and Shields 807-808). Expectations played a significant role

throughout the study. It was found that independents are twice as likely to vote for the Republican candidate when the Republican is expected to win. From the results, it was also found that when the Democrat was expected to win, independent Republicans and weak Republicans were more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate (Goidel and Shields 808). A study by Albert Mehrabian, reported in The Journal of Applied Social Psychology (1998), tested the relative importance of the bandwagon (rally around the winner) effect versus the underdog (empathic support for those trailing) effect. Bogus poll results presented to voters prior to the 1996 Republican primary clearly showed the bandwagon effect to predominate on balance. Indeed, approximately 6% of the variance in the vote was explained in terms of the bogus polls, showing that poll results (whether accurate or inaccurate) can significantly influence election results in closely contested elections. In particular, assuming that one candidate "is an initial favorite by a slim margin, reports of polls showing that candidate as the leader in the race will increase his or her favorable margin" (Mehrabian, 1998, p. 2128). Thus, as poll results are repeatedly reported, the bandwagon effect will tend to snowball and become a powerful aid to leading candidates. During the 1992 U.S. presidential election, Vicki G. Morwitz and Carol Pluzinski conducted a study, which was published in The Journal of Consumer Research. At a large northeastern university, some of 214 volunteer business students were given the results of student and national polls indicating that Bill Clinton was in the lead. Others were not exposed to the results of the polls. Several students who had intended to vote for Bush changed their minds after seeing the poll results (Morwitz and Pluzinski 58-64). Additionally, British polls have shown an increase to public exposure. Sixty-eight percent of voters had heard of the general election campaign results of the opinion poll in 1979. In 1987, this number of voters aware of the results increased to 74% (McAllister and Studlar 725). According to British studies, there is a consistent pattern of apparent bandwagon effects for the leading party.

BANDWAGON EFFECT IN MARKETING

Businesses adopt various strategies to sell their products. They need to price the products right and make them available at the right place and to the right audience, as well as promote them adequately. Businesses often use a marketing strategy called the bandwagon effect to make their products more appealing to customers.

BANDWAGON ADVERTISING Bandwagon advertising is when you get a large group of companies all advertising through the same medium. An example would be Googles AdWords which has enticed many internet advertisers into using Google exclusively for their online marketing.

If you were to advertise to create a bandwagon, then you would be working on forming a popular opinion to the masses that would virally create a domino effect in belief or action through your advertising campaign. Bandwagon is one of the most common techniques in both wartime and peacetime and plays an important part in modern advertising. Bandwagon is also one of the seven main propaganda techniques identified by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in 1938. Bandwagon is an appeal to the subject to follow the crowd, to join in because others are doing so as well. Bandwagon propaganda is, essentially, trying to convince the subject that one side is the winning side, because more people have joined it. The subject is meant to believe that since so many people have joined, that victory is inevitable and defeat impossible. Since the average person always wants to be on the winning side, he or she is compelled to join in. However, in modern propaganda, bandwagon has taken a new twist. The subject is to be convinced by the propaganda that since everyone else is doing it, they will be left out if they do not. This is, effectively, the opposite of the other type of bandwagon, but usually provokes the same results. Subjects of bandwagon are compelled to join in because everyone else is doing so as well. When confronted with bandwagon propaganda, we should weigh the pros and cons of

joining in independently from the amount of people who have already joined, and, as with most types of propaganda, we should seek more information. BANDWAGONING In realist theories of international relations, bandwagoning refers to the act of weaker states joining a stronger power or coalition within balance of power politics. The term is opposed to balancing, and unlike balancing, is a relatively new term. Bandwagoning was coined by Quincy Wright in A Study of War (1942) and popularized by Kenneth Waltz in Theory of International Politics (1979) (in his work, Waltz incorrectly attributes Stephen Van Evera with coining the term). Bandwagoning occurs when weaker states decide that the cost of opposing a stronger power exceeds the benefits. The stronger power may offer incentives, such as the possibility of territorial gain, trade agreements, or protection, to induce weaker states to join with it. Realism predicts that states will bandwagon rarely, only when there is no possibility of building a balancing coalition or their geography makes balancing difficult (i.e. surrounded by enemies). Bandwagoning is considered to be dangerous because it allows a rival state to gain power. A belief that bandwagoning happens more frequently is sometimes considered to be implied by the theory of containment. Snowball effect is another kind of bandwagon effect. It is the figurative term for a process that starts from an initial state of small significance and builds upon itself, becoming larger (graver, more serious), and also perhaps potentially dangerous or disastrous (a vicious circle, a "spiral of decline"), though it might be beneficial instead (a virtuous circle). This is a very common clich in cartoons and modern theatrics and it is also used in Psychology. The common analogy is with the rolling of a small ball of snow down a snow-covered hillside. As it rolls the ball will pick up more snow, gaining more mass and surface area, and picking up even more snow and momentum as it rolls along.

EXAMPLES OF BANDWAGON EFFECT GREEN BANDWAGON One example of the bandwagon effect is the growth of the green movement. In the late 1980s, a series of events led to growing popularity for the green movement. Natural disasters such as flooding and famine brought focus to bear on Earth-friendly practices. The Green Party won a substantial number of votes in the 1989 United Kingdom elections. All this led some marketers to get on the green bandwagon. They declared their products to be green in order to appeal to consumers. IT MARKETING Another example of the bandwagon effect is in the information technology sector. Corporate IT departments, instead of putting in systems that best meet their needs, tend to go for "best of class" vendors. This way, in case of a cyber-attack or other negative experience, administrators can deflect any assertion that they failed to put in place adequate IT safeguards. To take advantage of this bandwagon effect, IT vendors may choose to position themselves as "best of class."

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Thinking about the relationship between HR and HR information systems strategy making enables the full transformation al capacity of HR systems to be utilized, whatever the HRM practices in place or desired. Taking account of the

automate/informate/transformate potential of HR system can positively influence the nature and implementation of HRM-style, philosophies and practices.

CONCLUSION

Thus the bandwagon effect is a well documented form of groupthink in behavioral science and has many applications. The general rule is that conduct or beliefs spread among people, as fads and trends clearly do, with "the probability of any individual adopting it increasing with the proportion that have already done so". As more people come to believe in something, others also "hop on the bandwagon" regardless of the underlying evidence. The bandwagon effect has wide implications, but is commonly seen in politics, consumer and social behavior. In microeconomics, bandwagon effect describes interactions of demand and preference. The bandwagon effect arises when people's preference for a commodity increases as the number of people buying it increases. In politics, the bandwagon effect occurs in voting: some people vote for those candidates or parties who are likely to succeed (or are proclaimed as such by the media), hoping to be on the "winner's side" in the end. In marketing, businesses often use a marketing strategy called the bandwagon effect to make their products more appealing to customers. Bandwagon is one of the most common techniques in modern advertising.

REFERENCES
1. Colman, Andrew (2003). Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 77. ISBN 0-19-280632-7. 2. Sherif, M. (1936). The psychology of social norms. New York: Harper Collins. 3. Bikhchandani, Sushil; Hirshleifer, David; Welch, Ivo (1992). "A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades". Journal of Political Economy 100 (5): 9921026. Doi:10.1086/261849. JSTOR 2138632. 4. Lohmann, S. (1994). "The Dynamics of Informational Cascades: The Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig, East Germany, 1989-91". World Politics 47 (1): 42101. doi:10.2307/2950679. JSTOR 2950679. 5. "Bandwagon". Dictionary.com. Archived from the original on 12 March 2007. Retrieved 2007-03-09. 6. "Bandwagon Effect". Retrieved 2007-03-09. 7. Nadeau, Richard; Cloutier, Edouard; Guay, J.-H. (1993). "New Evidence About the Existence of a Bandwagon Effect in the Opinion Formation Process". International Political Science Review 14 (2): 203213. doi:10.1177/019251219301400204. 8. Leibenstein, Harvey (1950). "Bandwagon, Snob, and Veblen Effects in the Theory of Consumers' Demand". Quarterly Journal of Economics 64 (2): 183207.

doi:10.2307/1882692. 9. Gisser, Misch; McClure, James; kten, Giray; Santoni, Gary (2009). "Some Anomalies Arising from Bandwagons that Impart Upward Sloping Segments to Market Demand". Econ Journal Watch 6 (1): 2134. 10. Carole Tansley, Sue Newell, Hazel Williams; Effecting HRM-style practices through an integrated human resource information system; Source: Personnel Review Volume: 30 Issue: 3 2001