John Ronson, Shame, and Information Cascades

Jon Ronson’s amazingly funny, honest and curious book “So you’ve been publicly shamed” explores different cases of public shaming. One of the major themes of this adventure tackles the question of why so many people are willing to tweet horrible things about a private individual that might have been misunderstood in a tweet. One of his examples is Justine Sacco shaming after she tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” Jon Ronson makes the very convincing point that Justine probably isn’t so stupid to actually believe this. So why did 1000s of people tweet the meanest of things about Justine who might have phrased a joke badly. Ronson proposes two theories:

• (a) People genuinely believe that they are doing a good thing when publicly shaming Justine Sacco.

• (b) People are overcome by a “madness of the crowds”; a Stanford-Prison-Experiment-like-dynamic in which evil takes over and people start being cruel to the underdog.

Good question. Does the shamer have good intentions or has he gone mad amongst the crowd? The book’s major task was to answer this question and reconcile these two opposing theories. You’ll have to read it yourself to find out how Ronson does this.

I would like to bring an economics solution to the table: Information Cascades, in particular the Bickhandi, Hirschleifer, and Welch model (BHW model).

The assumptions:

There are agents with limited information about Justine Sacco The agents must decide whether to shame (1) or not to shame (0) Agents make their choice sequentially and the order is known (only if someone retweets her can one see and take action in (1) or (0)) Agents have private opinion but can see decision of predecessor All agents are rational

The process:

We know that an agent has private information meaning that he/she has her opinion about the tweet which might overwhelmingly be: “That’s a poorly written joke”, rather than “she is a racist”.

We also know that the agent can see decision of predecessors (Other people’s tweets).

Private and Public opinion will now clash to finally form a decision of either (1) or (0).

If the only visible decision out there on the twitter world are (1)s then one doubts one own private information so much so that one will not speak out for a (0) and in some cases even do (1) although private information was leaning towards (0)

Outcome:

Whether someone is shamed is path dependent and idiosyncratic. This means that it is important that the first few decisions are (1)s at which point the whole system is in a positive feedback ignoring private reservations and flogging on to public conformity.

Ronson writes: “There must have been amongst her shamers a lot of people who chose to willfully misunderstand it, for some reason.” I think the reason is that in an information cascade private information is ignored when there is contrasting public information. This leads to a positive feedback loop in which public information grows in only one direction, shaming.