Modified: February 22, 2022
preference cascade
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.A lot of how people act is driven by how they think they're 'supposed' to act. There's always some tension (conscious or unconscious) between what you really believe or want to do, and what you say or do because of social pressure. This is true even for 'courageous' people: you only have the attention or cognitive capacity to be weird in a few areas at once. We all have to delegate some of our cognition externally.
But these social forces can change quickly as part of a preference cascade. Some people start acting differently, and this creates a local disturbance in social pressures. People within the bubble will suddenly be free to reveal their own preference for the new order, and the bubble expands. The change happens gradually, then suddenly.
Examples:
- Support for Trump in the Republican party.
- Preference for remote work following the Covid-19 pandemic.