Social influence in public and private behaviors

Abstract

I propose that motive and degree of peer influence are likely to differ between public and private behaviors. To compare peer influence between them quantitatively, I designed and analyzed a large-scale field experiment involving more than 37 million users on WeChat Moments ads. In the experiment, I randomized the number of social cues (i.e. peers' endorsements of ads) and identified the effects of them on consumers' public (i.e. liking) and private (i.e.clicking and following) responses to ads. The results show that public responses were associated with significantly more positive effects of social cues than private responses, while both of them were susceptible to a significant peer influence. Tie strength generally exerted larger effects on public responses than on private responses. Relative to homophily, influence explains more of the temporal clustering of public behaviors than private behaviors. This is among the first papers comparing the peer influence in different behaviors.