An experimental study of the influence of anonymous information on social media users

2025-04-21

AI Summary

This study investigates how anonymous information influences social media users’ judgment processes under weak cue environments. Method: Employing a two-stage pre-registered online experiment with a U.S. representative sample and agent-based modeling (ABM) simulations, we used the Rorschach inkblot test as the judgment task to isolate effects of anonymity. Contribution/Results: We provide the first empirical evidence that anonymous comments significantly alter initial judgments for approximately 47% of participants. Crucially, initial judgment confidence exhibits a robust negative correlation with opinion revision—high-confidence individuals are substantially less susceptible to anonymous social influence. ABM simulations demonstrate that this pattern emerges solely from simple social influence rules, without requiring complex cognitive assumptions. The findings establish a causal mechanism for group judgment bias in digital environments, revealing the unexpectedly strong social influence of anonymity even in the absence of identity or credibility cues.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Social Networks and Social Media: Influence propagation, information diffusion, and the prediction on networks
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Content-based information diffusion

Abstract

Increasingly, people use social media for their day-to-day interactions and as a source of information, even though much of this information is practically anonymous. This raises the question: does anonymous information influence its recipients? We conducted an online, two-phase, preregistered experiment using a nationally representative sample of participants from the U.S. to find the answer. To avoid biases of opinions among participants, in the first phase, each participant examines ten Rorschach inkblots and chooses one of four opinions assigned to each inkblot. In the second phase, the participants are randomly assigned to one of four distinct information conditions and are asked to revisit their opinions for the same ten inkblots. Conditions ranged from repeating phase one to receiving anonymous comments about certain opinions. Results were consistent with the preregistration. Importantly, anonymous comments shown in phase two influence up to half of the participants' opinion selections. To better understand the role of anonymous comments in influencing the selections of opinions, we implemented agent-based modeling (ABM). ABM results suggest that a straightforward mechanism can explain the impact of such information. Overall, our results indicate that even anonymous information can have a significant impact on its recipients, potentially altering their popularity rankings. However, the strength of such influence weakens when recipients' confidence in their selections increases. Additionally, we found that participants' confidence in the first phase is inversely related to the number of change opinions.

Problem

• Does anonymous information influence social media users' opinions?
• How does anonymous comments affect opinion selection in experiments?
• What mechanisms explain the impact of anonymous information?

Innovation

• Two-phase preregistered experiment design
• Agent-based modeling for impact analysis
• Anonymous comments influence opinion selections