Pennies and Social Proof

            Every Easter, my grandpa unveils a jar full of money and asks all of the cousins to guess how much money is in the jar. Whoever gets closest, gets to keep the money. And this isn’t just your standard size jar, but can hold a gallon or more, so guessing how much money is in the jar can get pretty difficult. The first year he did this, it was all with pennies. Even though there thousands of pennies in the jar, it was relatively easy compared to the other years because we had to consider only one value and one size of coin. After this year, though, my grandpa made it more challenging by using an assortment of coins as well as dollar bills and the occasional five-dollar bill. In this case, those guessing had to account for the different sizes of coins and bills and also the value of these varying currencies. Regardless, guessing how much money was in the gallon jar, whether it was just pennies or an assortment of coins and bills, proved to be a challenge.

            I remember trying to come up with a logical way of determining how much money was in the jar, as all my siblings and cousins were trying to do. Some of the cousins were going around asking others what they were putting down as their answer. Most of us had absolutely no idea what to put down as our guess, so it made sense to ask around to see what other people were thinking. If your guess is extremely higher or lower than the others, then you are probably going change your answer. Since you have no idea if your guess is right, you look for confirmation from other people’s answers. If their answers are all similar and yours is drastically different, you would assume that their answers are right.

            Most of us, however, kept our guesses secret and would share what we put down after handing the slip of paper to our grandpa. There are a couple of cousins who always seem to overestimate the amount in the jar year after year. If I can remember correctly, my cousin Stevie put down that there were about 12,000 pennies in the gallon jar when I put about 5,000. Most of the guesses for that year ended up being from 3,000 to 5,000 pennies, so Stevie felt pretty nervous after he had turned in his guess. Since he realized that his guess was significantly higher than most everyone else’s, he assumed that his guess would be far off from the correct answer (which it was). As well, the cousins who had put down guesses that were much lower than what the majority of us were putting down felt pretty foolish after turning in their slip and finding out everyone else’s guesses. While they had been confident in their answers earlier, they then started to believe that an accurate guess would be in the ballpark of what the others had put down.

            All of this follows along with the social proof principle of social influence. People tend to look to others when they are not sure how to act in a certain situation. By looking at the behavior of others, they can garner an idea of how they themselves should behave as well. When we are unsure of how to act in a situation, we don’t just observe the behavior of others, but assume that this behavior is correct. So if one of the cousins had gone around asking what everyone else was putting for their guesses, he or she would most likely consider his or her own guess in this context and the guess, based on this phenomenon, would be close to the other guesses. Even if the cousin’s initial hunch was closer to the actual amount of pennies, if everyone whom he or she had talked to had a much higher number that wasn’t as accurate, the cousin would most likely change the guess to match theirs.

            The “monkey see, monkey do” situation works in this case because most of the cousins had no idea how much money was in the jar or how to go about guessing a correct answer. We were all unsure of ourselves and thus easily influenced by each other’s guesses. However, if one of us happened to be an expert on guessing the amount of money in a jar, we wouldn’t look to others to determine the amount we should be guessing. If everyone else seemed to be guessing an amount that was drastically different from our own, then the situation gets trickier. Depending on the confidence of the individual in his or her own expertise in guessing, he or she would either stick with the initial guess or change the guess to conform to what everyone else is guessing. While a situation like guessing the amount of money in a jar is not particularly earth shattering, it is interesting to speculate the effects of social influence in situations that are of greater importance.