Research Shows Online Effects Real-World

New research in the journal Nature highlights the potential for online social networks shaping real-world behavior.

A “Get out the vote” message on Facebook during the 2010 congressional elections influenced the voting behavior of millions of recipients and their friends, according to an interview with NPR correspondent, Shankar Vedantam.

Political scientist, James Fowler, of the University of California, ran an experiment where people, logged into Facebook, saw a button on top of their news feed.   The button said: “I Voted.”   A subset of those people saw photographs of six of their friends who had clicked the “I Voted” button.

[quote float=”left”]The effect was small, but it was real – and spread over millions of people, it translated into tens of thousands of additional voters.[/quote]What Fowler found was that people who saw photographs of their friends who had clicked the “I Voted” button, were significantly more likely themselves to click the button saying that they had voted too.

So far that just sounds like online peer pressure.  That’s nothing new.

What makes this interesting is what Fowler did next.   He cross-referenced the Facebook “I Voted” data with state voting records.   Looking at only a small sample, he concluded there WAS, indeed, a correlation.

That demonstrates the online world creates real-world reactions.   Pretty cool, right?