Music, Social Proof, Appeal and Peer-review.

...not that kind of psychologist

A 1982 BBs paper on peer review from Peters & Ceci is making the rounds on Twitter. The gist is that they submitted already published papers, with altered author names, to scientific journals, and received rejections that had nothing to do with the papers being basically plagiarized, but more comments on the quality of the research

This shows that publication/peer review may be a bit of a crap-shoot. Maybe. (I’d rather take my chances with publication than with die-throwing though).
But, it reminds me of a couple of papers I’ve assigned to my students in my market psychology course, both from Salganik and Watts. Instead of peer-reviewing paper, they look at the entertainment market – music. (Both papers linked here, and below)

Let me dolly back a bit. (cue Haitian divorce). My course is based on Cialdini’s “influence”. The core here is that people use a number of cues…

View original post 1,631 more words