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Knowing what other listeners
: In a later study, Watts and Salganik tried to force the issue, by actually manipulating the order of songs' perceived popularity. While this caused a short-term lift in the popularity of actually unpopular songs, they question “whether these dynamics would have led to permanent effects on the popularity of the songs, or whether the observed effects were merely transitory.” Duncan Watts and Matthew Salganik, “Leading the Herd Astray: An Experimental Study of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in an Artificial Cultural Market,”
Social Psychology Quarterly
71 (Dec. 2008): 338–55.

“When individual decisions”
: See Matthew Salganik, Peter Sheridan Dodds, and Duncan J. Watts, “Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market,”
Science
, Feb. 10, 2006, 855.

In 2013, it was estimated
: See “The Death of the Long Tail,”
www.​midia​consulting.​com
.

Molanphy suggests that if radio
: And, by contrast, things that were less popular would suffer. When, in 1991, the SoundScan “point of sale” system was introduced, which brought new granularity and accuracy to the reporting of record sales,
Billboard
noted that forty-five albums, many by “developing artists,” “fell off the chart altogether.” See Geoff Mayfield, “A Decade Ago, SoundScan Burst onto the Scene,”
Billboard
, June 2, 2001.

“the world had suddenly”
: Ortega,
Revolt of the Masses
, 38. For a good discussion of the various models of linguistic diffusion, see John Nerbonne, “Measuring the Diffusion of Linguistic Change,”
Philosophical Transactions B
370, no. 1666 (April 2015).

There are said to be
: This estimate comes from Eric D. Beinhocker,
The Origin of Wealth: Evolution
,
Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 9.

studies suggest social media
: Take, for example, a number of studies that have found correlations between Facebook usage and self-esteem. “Given that 10 million new photographs are uploaded to Facebook every hour (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013), Facebook provides women with a medium for frequently engaging in appearance-related social comparisons, and can therefore potentially contribute to body image concerns among young women.” See Jasmine Fardouly et al., “Social Comparisons on Social Media: The Impact of Facebook on Young Women's Body Image Concerns and Mood,”
Body Image
13 (March 2015): 38–45.

“frenzy”
: Carol Pogash, “During Bakery Break-In, Only Recipes Are Taken,”
New York Times
, March 6, 2015.

“lexical innovation”
: The historian Irving Allen writes, “The new culture of urbanism included lexical culture. Some of it was slang that expressed new social categories, new forms of social inequality, new relationships, new technologies, new ways of life, and other ruptures of tradition.” See Allen,
The City in Slang
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 5.

It spreads outward
: See, for example, Emile Alirol et al., “Urbanisation and Infectious Diseases in a Globalised World,”
Lancet: Infectious Diseases
11, no. 2 (Feb. 2011): 131–41.

“composite result of what”
: Leonard Bloomfield,
Language
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1933), 46.

Media, ever more global
: See Bates L. Hoffer, “Language Borrowing and Language Diffusion: An Overview,”
Intercultural Communication Studies
11, no. 4 (2002). See also Ben Olah, “English Loanwords in Japanese: Effects, Attitudes, and Usage as a Means of Improving Spoken English Ability,”
http://​www.​u-​bunkyo.​ac.​jp/​center/​library/​image/​kyukiyo9_​177-​188.​pdf
.

New Yorkers, already physically exposed
: See, for example, Allison Stadd, “Guess What the World's Most Active Twitter City Is?,”
Social Times
(blog),
Adweek
, Jan. 2, 2013,
http://​www.​adweek.​com/​socialtimes/​most-​active-​twitter-​city/​475006
.

“Living and working online”
: See R. Alexander Bentley and Matthew W. Hann, “Is There a ‘Neutral Theory of Anthropology'?,” from comments in Lansing and Cox, “Domain of the Replicators,” 118.

Whatever the direction
: Jan Lorenz et al., “How Social Influence Can Undermine the Wisdom of Crowd Effect,”
PNAS
108, no. 22 (2011). As the authors note, “Presumably, herding is even more pronounced for opinions or attitudes for which no predefined correct answers exist.” This can certainly be applied to new fashions, new art, new music. As Mark Buchanan notes, James Surowiecki's influential book,
The Wisdom of Crowds
, noted—in a message that seems to be often overlooked—that for crowds to be wise, people have to judge independently of one another; only “unbiased” estimates will average into accurate estimates.

They take less information
: If we think about the
Billboard
charts in this way, the more people see other people liking hit songs, the more they will listen to those same songs, the less frequently they will range outside that narrow band of songs to listen to others, and, via a sort of “confidence bias,” the more convinced they will be that those hits must be what is best to listen to.

“forgets that there is no objective”
: Peter Paul Moormann, “On the Psychology of Judging Cats,” Rolandus Union International,
http://​rolandus.​org/​eng/​library/​judging/​moormano3.​html
.

A Belgian study
: Filip Boen et al., “The Impact of Open Feedback on Conformity Among Judges in Rope Skipping,”
Psychology of Sport and Exercise
7, no. 6 (Nov. 2006): 577–90.

classical music competitions
: See Herbert Glejser and Bruno Heyndels, “Efficiency and Inefficiency in the Ranking in Competitions: The Case of the Queen Elisabeth Music Contest,”
Journal of Cultural Economics
25, no. 2 (May 2001): 109–29.

synchronized swim meets
: See Vietta Wilson, “Objectivity and Effect of Order of Appearance in Judging of Synchronized Swimming Meets,”
Perceptual and Motor Skills
44, no. 1 (Feb. 1977): 295–98.

“Judges,” she concluded
: Wändi Bruine de Bruin, “Save the Last Dance for Me: Unwanted Serial Position Effects in Jury Evaluations,”
Acta Psychologica
8, no. 3 (March 2005): 245–60.

Nothing comes before or after
: For a review see S. R. Schmidt, “Distinctiveness and Memory: A Theoretical and Empirical Review,” in
Learning and Memory: A Comprehensive Reference
, ed. John H. Byrne (Oxford: Academic Press, 2008), 125–44.

“direction of comparison effect”
: See Amos Tversky, “Features of Similarity,”
Psychological Review
84, no. 4 (July 1977): 327–52. See also Susan Powell Mantel and Frank R. Kardes, “The Role of Direction of Comparison, Attribute-Based Processing, and Attitude-Based Processing on Consumer Preference,”
Journal of Consumer Research
25 (March 1999): 335–52.

Judges need to be looking
: As Bruine de Bruin writes, “Jury members may have noticed that the first figure skater made an impressive pirouette, the second an extraordinary double axel, and the third a breathtaking choreography.” So while skater 8 might have made an equally good pirouette as skater 7, the amazing double axel that only skater 8 performed draws an inordinate amount of attention. Even here, memory is implicated, because judges, seduced by what skater 8 did that was different from skater 7, have perhaps by now forgotten what skater 7
did
that was different from skater 8. See Bruine de Bruin, “Save the Last Dance for Me.”

“If my main rival”
: Laurie Whitwell, “Smith Playing Russian Roulette as Gymnast Will Wait Until Last Minute to Decide Which Routine to Perform on Pommelhorse,”
Daily Mail
, Aug. 3, 2012.

“difficulty bias”
: See Hillary N. Morgan and Kurt W. Totthoff, “The Harder the Task, the Higher the Score: Findings of a Difficulty Bias,”
Economic Inquiry
52, no. 3 (July 2014): 1014–26.

“if the preceding gymnast”
: Lysann Damisch, Thomas Mussweiler, and Henning Plessner, “Olympic Medals as Fruits of Comparison? Assimilation and Contrast in Sequential Performance Judgments,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied
12, no. 3 (2006): 166–78.

“one of the building”
: Thomas Mussweiler, “Same or Different? How Similarity
versus Dissimilarity Focus Shapes Social Information Processing,” in Jeffrey W. Sherman, Bertram Gawronski, and Yaacov Trope, eds.,
Dual-Process Theories of the Social Mind
(New York: Guilford Press, 2014), 328–39.

Judges will, in essence
: In another experiment, Mussweiler and Damisch asked people to spot differences or similarities between two sets of pictures. Then they were shown two filmed clips of ski jumps and asked to estimate lengths. Those “primed” to look for similarities in the photographs thought the ski jumps were closer in length than did the people who had looked for differences. These sorts of similarities or differences can be rather minor: When people are first shown a picture of an unattractive “target” person, research has shown, they generally judge themselves to be more attractive. Show them an attractive person first, and they do not get that same beauty boost. But when they learn they share the same birthday as the attractive target, they feel better about their own attractiveness, as if they have “assimilated” some of the target's good looks. Jonathan Brown et al., “When Gulliver Travels: Social Context, Psychological Closeness, and Self-Appraisals,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
62, no. 5 (1992): 717–27.

Now the “Canadian” gymnast
: This raises the interesting idea that a judge need not even be from the same country as an athlete for a form of “nationalistic” bias to occur.

Even if the fact of noticing
: As Ravi Dhar and colleagues note, “It is likely that consumers judge similarity or dissimilarity when they come across new products in reference to what they already own. For example, individuals may evaluate the similarity of a new house being built to their own house. Such judgments of similarity are often made without simultaneously making a preference or evaluative judgment.”

In what is known as the “cheerleader effect”
: As the psychologists Drew Walker and Edward Vul note, the group setting “biases their percepts of individual items to be more like the group average.” Walker and Vul, “Hierarchical Encoding Makes Individuals in a Group Seem More Attractive,”
Psychological Science
25, no. 1 (Jan. 2014): 230–35.

For similar reasons
: R. Post et al., “The Frozen Face Effect: Why Static Photographs May Not Do You Justice,”
Frontiers in Psychology
3 (2012), doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.19122.

“Participants compared themselves”
: See Thomas Mussweiler, Katja Rüter, and Kai Epstude, “The Man Who Wasn't There: Subliminal Social Comparison Standards Influence Self-Evaluation,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
40, no. 5 (2004): 689–96. Similar results were achieved on measures like aggression; people judged themselves more aggressive when they “saw” an image of Arnold Schwarzenegger versus the “German pop-singer Nena.” Ravi Dhar, Stephen M. Nowlis, and Steven J. Sherman, “Comparison Effects on Preference Construction,”
Journal of Consumer Research
26, no. 3 (Dec. 1999): 293–306.

Research of actual speed-dating trials
: Saurabh Bhargava and Ray Fisman, “Contrast Effects in Sequential Decisions: Evidence from Speed Dating” (Columbia Business School, 2012). Curiously, the authors note, “while both male and female dating decisions are determined by contemporaneous target attractiveness, only male evaluators are sensitive to prior target attractiveness. For males, the contrastive influence of recent target attractiveness is 31 percent as large as the influence of current target attractiveness.”

One study presented subjects
: David A. Houston, Steven J. Sherman, and Sara M. Baker, “The Influence of Unique Features and Direction of Comparison on Preferences,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
25, no. 2 (1989): 121–41.

“Judging one experience”
: See Tanuka Ghoshal et al., “Uncovering the Coexistence of Assimilation and Contrast Effects in Hedonic Sequences” (Tepper School of Business, paper 1395, 2012),
http://​repository.​cmu.​edu/​tepper/​1395
.

A person's preference set
: More discussion of Chris Noessel's 11th Person Game can be found at Christopher Noessel, “Is Serial Presentation a Problem in the Circuit?,”
Sci-Fi Interfaces
, Oct. 4, 2013,
http://​scifiint​erfaces.​wordpress.​com/​2013/​10/​04/​is-​serial-​presentation-​a-​problem-​in-​the-​circuit/
. It is interesting to think how this game might be manipulated: If a perceived-to-be-undesirable candidate were sent through the doorway first, one imagines a person would subsequently make a faster choice; having seen the “worst,” the person would recalibrate his notion of the best. Sending an extremely desirable person through the door first might prolong one's decision, as if one had raised one's own internal bar (not to mention the player will be more choosy in trying to pick someone who approaches the ideal set by the first candidate).

“Similarity serves as a basis”
: See Amos Tversky,
Preference, Belief, and Similarity: Selected Writings
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 34.

“are simultaneously compared”
: Moormann, “On the Psychology of Judging Cats.”

“The ideal Bombay”
: The breed standards are available via the Web site of the Cat Fancier's Association,
http://​www.​cfainc.​org/
.

“Don't believe everything”
: Take, for instance, the description that TICA (or the International Cat Association, one of the world's two largest breeding councils) gives to the Donskoy: “The Donskoy is in a class of its own. It is a highly intelligent, beautiful loving cat that looks directly into your eyes and seems to penetrate your very soul.” That is probably the most sober sentence in the entire description of this cat, which is also compared to “extra terrestrials coming from the outer universe.” But even the official standard lays it on pretty thick: “The Donskoy is a very intriguing, unique, soft-hearted and social cat of medium size with soft hairless wrinkled skin that feels hot and velvety to the touch.” Can soft hearts, I ponder at the judge's table, be selected for genetically?

As the writer Sue Hubbell
: See Sue Hubbell's wonderful book
Shrinking the Cat
(New York: Mariner Books, 2002).

But unlike dogs
: As Carlos A. Driscoll and colleagues point out, “Unlike dogs, which exhibit a huge range of sizes, shapes and temperaments, house cats are relatively homogeneous, differing mostly in the characteristics of their coats. The reason for the relative lack of variability in cats is simple: humans have long bred dogs to assist with particular tasks, such as hunting or sled pulling, but cats, which lack any inclination for performing most tasks that would be useful to humans, experienced no such selective breeding pressures.” See Driscoll et al., “The Evolution of House Cats,”
Scientific American
, June 2009.

“Now that [the cat]”
: Harrison William Weir,
Our Cats and All About Them
(London: Fancier's Gazette Limited, 1892), 84,
http://​www.​gutenberg.​org/​files/​35450/​35450-h/​35450-h.​htm
.

“all the authority”
: See Walker Van Riper, “Aesthetic Notions in Animal Breeding,”
Quarterly Review of Biology
7, no. 1 (March 1932): 84–92.

tabula rasa with a tail
: “Persevering fanciers might derive interest and amusement from trying to breed out-of-the-common specimens,” wrote Frances Simpson in
The Book of the Cat
. “A black-and-white spotted like a Dalmatian hound, or a cat marked with zebra stripes, could doubtless be produced in time by careful and judicious selection.” Fanciers invoked artistic principles of beauty but admitted they were sometimes prone to fashion on four legs. “At present in England the very dark smokes are the rage,” Simpson noted, “but in America the light ones are more sought after.” Simpson,
The Book of the Cat
(New York: Cassell, 1903), 236. Some suspected a certain arbitrariness at play. One commentator of the period, writing about the dog fancy, suggested there was nothing logical in why “a small eye shall be a merit in one breed (toy terrier) and a defect in another (King Charles spaniel).”
The Dog: Its Varieties and Management in Health and Disease
(London: Frederick Warne, 1873), 87.

“judicious mating”
: The twinning of these enterprises reached its apogee in the “Fitter Families” movement, a eugenics campaign that briefly swept through county fairs in the United States in the early twentieth century. A regular feature was the livestock-style judging of humans. “While the stock judges are testing the Holsteins, Jerseys, and White-faces in the stock pavilion,” as one official noted, “we are testing the Joneses, Smiths, and the Johnsons.” There, nestled among the “Milch Goat” and “Pet Stock” categories, were troops of families being measured on any number of things, including a mental agility test and dental exams. See Laura L. Lovett, “Fitter Families for Future Firesides: Florence Sherbon and Popular Eugenics,”
Public Historian
29, no. 3 (2007): 69–85. As a curious bit of historical trivia, one of the judges at a competition administering the “anthropomorphic structural assessment” was none other than James Naismith, the father of basketball.

with dogs at times
: On the eve of the twentieth century, a breeders' group formed near Stuttgart, notes the historian Aaron Skabelund. Their goal was to transform a local sheepdog into the vaunted “German shepherd,” a “primeval Germanic dog,” a “warlike proud German” that was eminently loyal and, in an eerie echo of what was to come, racially pure. See Skabelund, “Breeding Racism: The Imperial Battlefields of the ‘German' Shepherd Dog,”
Society and Animals
16 (2008): 354–71. Notes Skabelund, “People do not often recognize or forget that animal breeds, like human races, are contingent, constantly changing, culturally constructed categories that are inextricably interconnected to state formation, class structures, and national identities.”

Take the bulldog
: As the historian Harriet Ritvo writes about the Victorian dog fancy and the rise of London's canine population, “Any other kind of dog might compromise its owner's social status.” See Ritvo, “Pride and Pedigree: The Evolution of the Victorian Dog Fancy,”
Victorian Studies
28, no. 2 (1986): 227–53.

“The standard does not describe”
: From the Cat Fanciers' Association “Show Standards,”
http://​www.​cfainc.​org/​Portals/​0/​documents/​forms/​14-15​standards.​pdf
. This discrepancy between the standard and the reality can lead into philosophical thickets. Take the question of trying to establish the artistic ideal for a new breed. How do you know it is the perfect cat when you have never seen that type of cat before? As Vickie Fisher, president of TICA, told me, the first step is to answer the question, why is it a breed? Fisher points to the Munchkin, a relatively
new breed, based on a genetic mutation, that TICA, not without controversy, introduced in the 1990s. “The short-legged mutation came about,” she said, “so the idea was, let's make a breed. But what we saw at first in the creation—and we still see a lot of this now—is that one trait does not a breed make.” In other words, the Munchkin people were leaning an awful lot on those short legs.