Facebook users tend towards ‘copycat’ activity

A study of Facebook users has found a strong tendency towards copycat behaviour leads people to select apps based on their friends’ choices rather than the most popular.

Researchers from the University of Limerick, University of Oxford and the Harvard School of Public Health developed a mathematical model to examine online social networks.

The researchers found that users selected apps on the basis of recent adoptions by their friends rather than by using Facebook’s equivalent of a bestseller list of apps.