Between studying for finals and experimenting with cascades

The definition of cascades whether social or informational is that you simply rely on what others think, or in other words you do it because everyone is doing it. Cascades can indeed arise in serious matters like in collective decision making and stock buying. But I think it’s more predominate with trivial issues that require less thinking, or interest to invest time or energy to know more.

Yesterday, like most of this week the library was almost completely packed, but it would soon be more so. It was the 20^th anniversary of Snell library, and they decided to have the event in the lobby of the first floor right next to me. Cramming for a final, I of course decided to leave everything and check it out. It was a weird setting. For the first time as I can remember, they filled the lobby with chairs leaving little room on the sides for students to come and go. There were some empty chairs left at the end. But as bored as I was, I decided I’ll try something since everything looked chaotic as it is. It was next to the computer labs, so I pulled a chair from there and sat. I was the only one not in the crowd and started paying attention. Few minutes later someone passed by, looked at the situation, and then decided to pull a chair next to me. Again there were some seats left, but he decided to pull a chair opposite to the crowd. We ended up being 5 in this position. I left to try standing in a random position behind the crowd. Someone immediately came and stood right next to me to watch. I decided to leave and I thinking feeling alone he soon left. I went to observe from far away for a while and didn’t see anyone standing at all. I came back and stood for a while and soon was joined by another person again. One of my friends stopped to chat, and this attracted 2 more people. I guess this situation and event would make any student in the area curious, but it was trivial enough for them that they didn’t want to exert energy or time to investigate how they can know more and whether is it OK to set down. They saw a student setting on a chair adjacent to the crowd, and figured that’s the right thing to do. When I stood up in random areas, it was these specific areas that attracted people to stand at. Similar thing can be observed in many other occasions where we are curious to know what’s going on but not interested enough to gather and analyze information, so we just follow whoever came before, thus creating a cascade .