From the Comments: Nudge Nudge, Herd Herd

A reader in Australia named Ian Lyons, in response to our “Herd Mentality” podcast, writes to say:

At the 2012 Sydney Festival, we created a sophisticated set of interactive dashboards showing which artists were buzzing (on Twitter and Facebook) in real-time, where people were coming from, interesting facts and live photos.

To my astonishment the most popular tool simply allowed you to see which show other people from your postcode were going to see. Viewed through the lens of behavioral economics, this makes perfect sense but it’s the opposite of what I would have predicted instinctively. In fact it almost didn’t get deployed because it was too simple.