under pressure

Ever wonder if the Amazon sales rank, or the "most popular" ranks on other sites influences sales of an item? This article explains an experiment in which two groups of students downloaded songs of unknown bands - one group was able to see the number of downloads a song had (popularity) and the other group was not.

The results showed that the popularity of a song directly effected how many times it was downloaded. With stuff like cyberbulling going on in schools, the evidence is piling up to show the virtual reach of peer pressure.