Why We Buy What Everyone Else Is Buying (Even When We Swear We Don't)

You would never fall for this

Picture yourself in a room with seven other people. A researcher holds up two cards. One has a single line on it. The other has three lines of different lengths. Your job is simple: say which of the three lines matches the first one. It's obvious. A child could do it.

The first person gives the wrong answer. Weird. The second person gives the same wrong answer. Then the third. By the time it gets to you, everyone in the room has confidently chosen a line that is clearly, visibly, laughably incorrect.

What do you do?

If you're like most people, you say what everyone else said. Even though you can see the right answer with your own eyes.

This is the Asch conformity experiment, first run by Solomon Asch in 1951. And the results still bother me.

75% of people went along with the group

Across Asch's trials, 75% of participants conformed to the group's wrong answer at least once. Not because they were confused. Not because the task was hard. The lines were obviously different lengths. They conformed because the social pressure of disagreeing with a unanimous group was more uncomfortable than giving an answer they knew was wrong.

When interviewed afterward, most participants said they knew the group was wrong. They just didn't want to be the odd one out.

Here's the part that should worry you if you sell anything: this wasn't about opinions or preferences. This was about physical reality. Straight lines on a piece of cardboard. If people will buckle on something that clear-cut, imagine what happens when the decision is actually ambiguous — like choosing between two SaaS products, or deciding whether to trust a company they've never worked with.

We haven't gotten better at this

You might think, okay, that was 1951. People were more conformist back then. We're more independent now. We have the internet. We do our own research.

A team of researchers put that assumption to the test. In 2023, a study published in the journal PLOS ONE replicated the Asch experiment with modern participants and found conformity rates that matched the original. Some conditions actually showed higher conformity than Asch recorded 70 years ago.

The researchers noted something interesting: the need for social approval hasn't decreased. If anything, constant exposure to other people's opinions — through reviews, social feeds, comment sections — might be making us more susceptible, not less.

What this actually looks like in buying decisions

I know what you're thinking. Line lengths in a lab are one thing. But do people really follow the crowd when spending their own money?

BrightLocal's 2024 Consumer Review Survey says yes, emphatically. 91% of consumers said reviews influence how they perceive a business. And here's the number that made me pause: only 42% of consumers now trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. That's down from 79% in 2020.

Read those two stats together. People trust reviews less than they used to — and yet reviews still influence 91% of them. That's not rational behavior. That's social conformity operating below the level of conscious decision-making.

People aren't reading reviews to gather information. They're reading reviews to see what everyone else thinks. There's a difference.

The "I'm not influenced by ads" effect

Psychologists have a name for this gap between what we believe about ourselves and what we actually do. It's sometimes called the third-person effect: people consistently believe that advertising and social influence affect other people more than it affects them.

You can see it in the BrightLocal data from earlier: people trust reviews less than they used to, yet 91% still say reviews influence their decisions. If you asked those people to explain the gap, most would insist they're the exception. The reviews didn't influence them. They just happened to choose the product with better feedback.

This is worth sitting with for a second. Your prospects will tell you — sincerely — that they make independent purchasing decisions based on features and price. And they genuinely believe that. But the data says their behavior tracks much more closely with what other people are doing.

Why "bestseller" works even when we know it's marketing

The bandwagon effect is the formal name for this phenomenon. People adopt behaviors and beliefs because they perceive that many other people do the same.

You see it everywhere once you start looking. "Most popular plan" badges on pricing pages. "Join 10,000+ customers" in hero sections. Amazon's entire review ecosystem. The restaurant with a line out the door getting more customers precisely because it has a line out the door.

René Girard, the French philosopher, called this mimetic desire: we don't want things because we've independently evaluated them. We want things because other people want them. Desire itself is borrowed.

That sounds bleak if you think about it too hard. But from a practical standpoint, it means something specific for businesses: the presence or absence of social proof on your site isn't just a nice-to-have design element. It's tapping into a deep psychological mechanism that your buyers can't override even when they're aware of it.

So what do you actually do with this?

I want to be careful here because "people are wired to follow the crowd, so manipulate them" is not the takeaway. The ethical application of conformity research is about removing doubt, not manufacturing false consensus.

If your product genuinely helps people, your job is to make that visible. Here's how the research suggests you do it.

Show that people like them bought it

The Asch experiment showed that conformity drops dramatically when even one other person dissents. The flip side: conformity is strongest when the group feels unanimous and relevant. For testimonials, that means your prospect needs to see people who look like them, work like them, and faced the same problem.

A SaaS founder looking at your pricing page doesn't care that a Fortune 500 company likes your product. They care that another founder at their stage got results. Match the testimonial to the reader.

Use numbers, but be honest about them

"Join 10,000+ teams" works because of the bandwagon effect. But there's a catch: BrightLocal found that consumers are increasingly skeptical of inflated claims. If your numbers feel too round or too good, they trigger the same suspicion that Asch's participants felt toward a perfect 5.0 rating.

Use real numbers. "847 teams signed up last quarter" is more believable than "thousands of happy customers" even though the second one sounds bigger.

Collect continuously, not once

Social proof has a freshness problem. A testimonial from 2022 feels dated. BrightLocal's 2024 data shows that review recency matters more than review volume for many consumers. Five recent testimonials outperform fifty old ones.

Build a system that collects testimonials as an ongoing process, not a one-time campaign. When prospects see that someone left a review last week, the implicit message is: people are still choosing this. That's the bandwagon in real time.

Put proof where decisions happen

Most businesses scatter testimonials on a dedicated "testimonials" page that nobody visits. The conformity research says social proof matters most at the moment of decision — your pricing page, your signup form, your checkout flow.

Move your strongest testimonials to the pages where people are actually deciding. A testimonial next to a "Start Free Trial" button is worth ten on a page someone has to navigate to find.

The uncomfortable takeaway

We like to think of ourselves as independent decision-makers. We compare features, read the fine print, weigh our options carefully. And we do some of that. But underneath the rational analysis, there's a 75-year-old psychology experiment quietly running in the background, checking what everyone else decided before we commit.

You can't turn that off. Neither can your customers. What you can do is make sure that when they look for signals from other people — and they will — those signals are there. Real customers, real results, recent and relevant.

That's not manipulation. That's just making sure the truth about your product is visible at the moment it matters.

PraiseLane helps you collect and display testimonials where they count. Guided prompts get customers to share real stories, not just star ratings. And the widget puts those stories on your pricing page, signup flow, or anywhere decisions happen.

Start collecting testimonials with PraiseLane

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Sources:

• Asch, S. E. (1951). "Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments." In H. Guetzkow (Ed.), Groups, Leadership and Men.
• Muric, G., et al. (2023). "A Replication and Extension of the Asch Experiment." PLOS ONE.
• BrightLocal (2024). "Local Consumer Review Survey 2024."
• Girard, R. (1961). "Deceit, Desire, and the Novel." Johns Hopkins University Press.