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> The Bandwagon Effect I don't know if this is a negative bias. Popular tech is well understood with known risks. Successful outcomes in software are hard enou

• chriswarbo 12y ago
  The effect isn't referring to popular technologies remaining popular; the effect is that, when we make decisions in a group, we unconsciously tend to agree with other people more than we otherwise would. For example, lets say you're asked to submit a survey of the suitability of a bunch of languages for a new project; say Python, Java, PHP, C# and Ruby. You may give Python 8/10, Java 7/10, PHP 6/10, C# 7/10 and Ruby 8/10. Now, imagine that instead of that survey, you were invited to a meeting where the chief architect informs everyone that the they haven't decided whether to use Java or C# yet, and since the CEO suggested PHP they decided to open it up for comments. Would you still give the same scores? The classic experiment for this used a social music website, where people could vote for what they liked. Unknown to the users, they were internally separated into groups, so that people in group A only saw scores based on other voters in group A, and so on. In each group, there were a couple of really high-scoring songs, with the rest scoring very badly; but the each group had chosen different songs as their favourites! Those which were regarded highly in group A were seen as terrible by group B, and vice versa. As a control, one of the groups was never shown any scores at all, so their votes were less biased. That group showed much less extreme results, with some songs scoring better than others, but not massively so.