If you’ve ever changed your mind about a movie after seeing an IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes score or felt oddly compelled to click on the Instagram post with more likes, you’re not alone — or irrational. You’re just human, swimming in a world where other people’s opinions subtly shape your own.
Throughout human evolution, social learning has been face-to-face. Children absorb knowledge from their parents, communities share stories, and culture was passed from kin to kin. This kind of social learning — rich, personal, and face-to-face — shaped our minds for millennia. All that started to change with Ancient Greece.
With the invention of democracy in ancient Greece, a new form of social information emerged: aggregated opinion — the quantified judgments of large, often anonymous groups. That only amplified with the internet. Today, most of the opinions you encounter come from people you’ll never meet, via digital platforms that distill thousands or millions of views into neat numbers and stars or hearts.
Aggregated opinion has changed the social landscape. It’s not just what one person thinks — it’s a quantified consensus. Think election polls, Amazon stars, Metacritic scores, or a tally of likes under a TikTok video. All that aggregated opinion changes our own, personal opinion, say psychologists Kerem Oktar and Tania Lombrozo.
But is that a good thing?
Your opinion? Nah, our opinion
The study is a comprehensive review rather than a single experiment. The authors looked at findings from psychology, marketing, political science, and even philosophy to understand how people respond to aggregated opinion — and why.
Aggregated opinion can be remarkably accurate, especially when it meets three criteria: large sample size, independent judgments, and informant reliability. The so-called “wisdom of crowds” — a phenomenon where group averages outperform individual guesses — has been repeatedly demonstrated. In a classic example, a crowd estimated the weight of an ox within 1% of its actual weight. Individually, most guesses were off. Together, they nailed it.
The wisdom of the crowd, if supported by a sufficiently large sample size, can outperform even a group of experts. But that only works when members aren’t copying each other. Let’s say you have one million people review a movie, giving it stars from 1 to 5; if everyone just gives their opinion, you’ll end up with one result. But if you show people what others voted, that could change their mind. The best aggregated opinion comes from many, independent minds. But on the internet, independence is increasingly rare.
Oktar and Lombrozo identify four paths through which aggregated opinions can change your mind:
- Informational path – Do you trust the crowd? Are they informed and independent? If not, their consensus won’t sway you.
- Functional path – Would changing your mind hurt you socially or emotionally? If yes, you’ll likely resist.
- Ontological path – Do you see the issue as subjective, objective, or unknowable? If it’s the former, other opinions matter less.
- Computational path – Do you have the mental bandwidth to process the opinion? If not, you might ignore it by default.
This has huge implications for fighting misinformation. Instead of bombarding people with consensus numbers, we need to understand why they believe what they do and tailor our approaches.
What this means in practice
The findings are particularly important for crafting effective communication messages. Given the nuanced way people respond to consensus, one-size-fits-all persuasion doesn’t work. Telling climate skeptics that “97% of scientists agree” might fall flat if they distrust scientists or see the issue as unknowable. But if you show why scientists are trustworthy — or reframe climate change as a moral concern aligned with their values — you might get traction. This is an example of the informational path.
In the functional path, a supporter of a corrupt politician might ignore polls that show that most people detest the politician owing to
social pressures from friends who also support the politician. In other words, there’s a social cost to changing your opinion on the politician. You could confront that person with polling numbers but it won’t do much. Instead, you could highlight trusted in-group voices who have shifted their stance. For example, “Even long-time supporters like [X public figure] have started speaking out — maybe they saw something important.” Alternatively, you could emphasize the values they already hold, like fairness or protecting their children’s future, and show how those values are better served elsewhere.
The researchers give the example of vegetarianism for the ontological path. A person may think that food choices are strictly personal — everyone’s entitled to their opinion and there’s no objective truth. Because they see dietary choices as subjective — a matter of taste, not truth — they don’t feel compelled to change. That opinion may be changed by making the issue feel more factual, highlighting the objective harms of industrial meat production: deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, and ethical concerns grounded in animal sentience.
Lastly, the computational path is something we’ve all been faced with at some point. Let’s say you’re browsing Amazon for a $5 phone charger. It has mixed reviews, but you’re in a rush and let’s face it, it’s just $5. Many consumers lack the time, energy, and motivation to process the reviews. You keep the belief not because it’s correct, but because it’s easy. It would take too much energy to shift the opinion.
You’re also in the loop
To add even more complexity to all of this is that you are part of the crowd shaping everyone else’s beliefs. Every time you leave a rating, click “like,” or answer a poll, you feed into the aggregated opinion machine. Your judgments ripple outward, influencing strangers in ways you’ll never see.
The main takeaway is that aggregated opinions can shape individual beliefs. The polls, the ratings, they’re always whispering in your ear. They’re whispering in everyone’s ear. But there’s no fixed response. Their influence depends on a combination of cognitive, social, and contextual factors. People don’t just passively absorb the majority view; instead, they evaluate aggregated opinion through four key psychological “paths”.
In short, a belief change in response to aggregated opinion isn’t automatic. It’s filtered through a psychological lens shaped by trust, motivation, perceived objectivity, and mental effort. Understanding these filters is useful for addressing misinformation, polarization, and public attitudes in the digital age.
In a world flooded with information, the danger isn’t just ignorance — it’s disinformation wrapped in the comforting guise of consensus. That’s why understanding how we respond to public opinion matters more than ever. In the age of likes and lies, the most important belief to update might be your belief in the crowd itself.
The study was published in Nature Reviews Psychology.
