Against the grain: Why change can’t rely on what’s popular

Popularity is a surprisingly conservatising force - what are the implications for behaviour change?

Popularity is one of the big currencies that shape our lives: publishers and media programmes sign popular celebrities to publish books or present TV programmes based on popularity drawing audiences. Forensic analysis is applied to understanding the popularity of Donald Trump and other political leaders. Social media influencers entire business model depends on public visibility, tracking metrics that tell them whether they are trending or fading. Popularity seems to be one of the most democratic forms of managing our collective lives: it feels authentic, something where we all have the potential to support those we like and to dispense with those that displease us.

With the apparent ubiquity of popularity as a measure of potency, relevance or resonance (take your pick!) it might therefore seem odd to suggest that perhaps it no longer has the standing it once had. But nevertheless, there is a case to be made that the value of popularity is in fact starting to decline, becoming an increasingly less important concern. Why? Well it appears that we have collectively started to see the way that digital platforms, PR machines, and political actors are able to engineer and exploit popularity. If this is the case, popularity no longer offers the same justification for governments seeking to enact policy, or for brands to see it as a consumer demand signal. Because if popularity is now starting to be seen as inauthentic and manufactured rather than something genuinely earned, it loses its force.

To examine this, we are using a behavioural lens to unpack this very familiar and omnipresent concept. We make the case that brands and policy makers, so used to leveraging popularity, may need to rethink their strategies in the face of a public who are starting to appear collectively cynical about its logics. Which means we have to ask the question, are we entering a post-popularity age? And if so, what are the implications for those involved in shaping behaviour change who often leverage the notion of popularity in its different forms?

The promise and power of popularity

But let’s start with the more familiar view of popularity: that it is a ‘good thing’ with a myriad of positive outcomes. First there is popularity itself – the very state of being popular is an end it itself, a pretty good outcome to have.

But it also has been seen to lead to a range of positive outcomes. For example, in organisational settings, where this is more often studied, popular people often display high core self-evaluation: they are typically confident, emotionally stable, and attribute their successes to personal skills rather than external factors. Being popular supports the development of strong workplace relationships and reinforces status.

So being popularity appears wholly advantageous. In fact, an increase in the stock of popularity from high school, is associated with about higher wages 35 years later.

And there have long been clear instrumental advantages to popularity: if we choose to back an unpopular (rather than a popular) position then we take on reputational risk. Hence the onetime mantra ‘No-one ever got sacked for buying IBM’, a brand which was a popular and therefore safe option for corporate decision makers.

However the IBM example also illustrates how popularity can also create negative outcomes as less popular ideas (or brands) that might in fact be better can get sidelined in favour of those that feel safer. Popularity can be a shield that deflects scrutiny but it can also impede more creative decisions.

Even more problematically, popularity can give cover to acts that might otherwise be challenged. To illustrate this, we can look at Andrew Jackson, a former general and the seventh president of the United States, Jackson was hugely popular driven by partisan newspapers, mass rallies, and a network of loyal appointees. His presidency used popularity as a justification to override institutional limits, ignoring Supreme Court rulings and centralising power under the banner of 'the people.' If this feels familiar, Jackson's approach of course prefigures what many populist movements do today.

How popularity came to be engineered

So popularity is not exactly the wonderful thing it first appears: there are downsides. We can see this more clearly if we take a brief look at the history of popularity. In fact, popularity was at one point not seen as a good thing, often being equated with volatility and mob rule. Writing at the time of the French Revolution, Gustave Le Bon wrote that the "unconscious action of crowds substituting itself for the conscious activity of individuals is one of the principal characteristics of the present age". In other words, being part of a crowd (a physical manifestation of popular) involved the loss of control, leading to emotion dominating over reason.

Professors of Communication, Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson set out how the period of the Enlightenment saw the emergence of democratic ideals alongside the expansion of the press. This alignment led to growing view that the media could help transform unruly crowds into informed publics. Political figures like Thomas Jefferson considered that an informed public was key to binding a nation together which meant that collective public opinion could (and should) be a foundation for legitimacy and in doing so preventing unrest.

It was therefore perhaps not a great leap when in the early 20th Century that Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, developed the concept of "engineering consent." He argued that democratic societies needed to be managed through the manipulation of unconscious desires and that elites could (and indeed should) shape public opinion using imagery, media spectacle, and the illusion of majority sentiment. In this view, popularity was less an emergent truth and more a managed perception, the result of directing an uninformed public’s attention so that they made the ‘right decision’.

This view of public sentiment continues today, albeit in a very different form with a digital ecosystem, where algorithmic amplification, behavioural targeting, and social media virality create the illusion of grassroots enthusiasm whilst simultaneously carefully steering it. As Gehl and Lawson argue, we now live in an age of "mass-personal social engineering,” a hybrid strategy where broadcast media techniques are combined with personalised content delivery to manufacture popularity.

The psychological constructs underlying popularity-engineering

This is a huge shift in the way of thinking about popularity, as we have moved 180 degrees away from it being about reflecting the authentic desires we might have, to instead considering it as a means of manipulating credentials and authority.

The psychological mechanisms underpin this have been explored by psychologist Mitch Prinstein who identifies two distinct types of popularity: likability and status. Likability is associated with being kind, helpful, and cooperative while status-based popularity is marked by dominance, visibility, and influence. Reflecting the historic trajectory, Prinstein worries we have become a status-obsessed society chasing visibility over connection and confusing emotional resonance with performative dominance.

This somewhat chequered view of popularity also has backing from a famous experiment conducted by computational social scientists Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds, and Duncan Watts. In their Music Lab experiment, participants were asked to listen to and rate previously unknown songs. Crucially, some participants could see how many times each song had been downloaded by others, while others could not. The results revealed that when people were exposed to popularity cues (e.g. download counts), their preferences began to align. Songs that gained early popularity continued to do so, while others were overlooked even if they were rated highly in merit-only conditions.

So again, this reinforces the way that the popularity of something does not simply reflect our personal tastes, but instead, becomes self-reinforcing. Something that is popular will simply become more popular, where visibility leads to more attention, eventually resulting in dominance. This phenomenon suggests that the popularity of viral success has often depended less on content quality and more on momentum, timing, and who sees it first.

The mechanisms of this have been so engrained in society for so long that we can now model the way popularity ebbs and flows. First names are an excellent source of historical and survey data to investigate this, which Jonah Bergera and Gael Le Mens used to explore the relationship between adoption velocity and cultural abandonment. They found in one study, for example, that names that have become popular faster tend to be abandoned faster. In a second study, they found that future parents were more hesitant to adopt names that had recently experienced sharper increases in adoption, seeing them as short-lived fads.

How we started to see the cynical side of popularity

We have so far given a fairly damning account of popularity, and its potential for manipulation. But as we can see from the way we can predict some behaviours based on popularity dynamics, it continues to have huge signalling value: for political leaders, it justifies mandates; for businesses, it implies relevance and consumer preference.

Whilst it may seem like business as usual then, there are limits to this assumption and our lived experience may mean we are gradually changing our perceptions. Drawing on Kolb’s work, learning begins not with abstract theory, but with a moment when existing beliefs are challenged by lived experience.

Applying this to policy, then for governments, this might look like a popular policy or leader suddenly losing credibility when public mood shifts and once-reliable approval metrics become volatile. For businesses, it may be the sudden failure of a widely liked campaign to convert into actual sales, or the backlash that follows a viral moment seen as inauthentic. For Kolb, these concrete experiences, where things fail to protect or perform as expected, are often the start of deeper reflection.

Through this process of experiential learning, we might begin to ask ourselves why popularity was assumed to be a sufficient measure of legitimacy or success. We begin to abstract lessons: that popularity is not a neutral signal but one shaped by algorithmic amplification, social proof bias, or reactive sentiment. From here, meta-cognition can take root, starting to reflect on whether popularity actually delivers in the way it once did.

We see this playing put in social media where there is an increasingly mocking of ‘clout-chasing’. For instance, Kansas City Chiefs Travis Kelce has found himself being criticised for appearing to leverage his relationship with Taylor Swift to drum up popularity for his podcast. And from politics, ex UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was regularly mocked for appearing to try too hard to be popular, particularly in his use of social media.

All this suggests that we are seeing a growing meta-cognition about popularity and with this questions come about whether it still has a grip on our lives in the way it once did.

Does this mean being unpopular is now more authentic?

Whilst popularity is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, the damaging side of it does appear to be increasingly understood. And if popular is not what it was once ‘cracked up to be,’ then perhaps being unpopular is worth considering. In fact this has a long tradition, with Greek philosopher Socrates pointing out that unpopularity was integral to the ‘examined life,’ as this involved standing in defiance of the crowd. Truth, he argued, is rarely popular at the moment of its arrival.

And the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard believed that real truth doesn’t come from following the crowd, but from how each person relates to it on their own terms. He famously said, “the crowd is untruth,” not because people are always wrong, but because when we go along with majority opinion, we often stop taking personal responsibility. For him, living ethically means stepping back from popular opinions and making honest, uncomfortable choices based on your own conscience, even if that means being unpopular. And true to his word, he was widely unpopular in his own lifetime, regularly mocked for his challenging of mainstream norms and authority.

The challenge that Kierkegaard experienced, or anyone who tries to critique the popular view of the time, is that it involves rowing against the current of "common sense," a term that is a shorthand for an unexamined alignment with dominant norms. We can see why this is tricky when we look at the psychological mechanism of cognitive ease: popular beliefs have an intuitive fluency that makes them feel true simply because they are familiar. As Duncan Watts argues in Everything Is Obvious, common sense gives the illusion of coherence and inevitability, obscuring the messy, changeable, and shaped-by-context our social world really is.

But of course if we ignore the unpopular, (as it seems is easy to do), then we risk shutting down the very conditions that allow alternatives to emerge. History is full of examples where what was once dismissed or ridiculed later reshaped the mainstream. Kierkegaard, mocked in his own time, is now considered a foundational thinker. The Impressionists, rejected by art institutions, went on to redefine modern aesthetics. Even civil rights movements, often deeply unpopular during their lifetimes, are now widely celebrated. Unpopularity, in these cases, wasn’t a sign of failure. It was the disruptive friction necessary for change.

Importantly, not all who are unpopular are dismissed. In some settings, unpopularity becomes a badge of authenticity or even a source of power. The idea of the misunderstood genius, like the poets Byron, Shelley or Blake, casts the outsider as someone whose worth simply has not yet been recognised. Their unpopularity becomes proof they are ahead of their time.

And from quite a different (but perhaps parallel) perspective, Holger J. Schmidt and Pieter Steenkamp created an ‘underdog brand management framework’ which they illustrated with an account of the way Apple’s successfully deployed this strategy. Their 1984 advertisement was a classic example, positioning the brand as rebellious and visionary simply because it wasn’t part of the popular mainstream.

But we can also see how unpopularity is leveraged by people such as Donald Trump and Jordan Peterson who often describe themselves as being unpopular - silenced or attacked, despite dominating public debate. Conspiracy theorist Michael Barkun suggests that if people can position that their beliefs are in conflict with orthodox (popular) notions, then they can position these ‘forces of orthodoxy’ as seeking to vilify and delegitimize either out of self-interest or some other negative motive. The resulting resentment is a very effective means of activating their base.

But just as popularity has a sense of growing cynicism, then perhaps the same could also be said of those courting unpopularity. Again, we may well be becoming wise to the way this is simply the same mechanisms of social-engineering but flipped around.

Are we moving to a post-popularity era?

So where next then, in that case, for popularity (or unpopularity)? Perhaps just as we saw with trust, there is an erosion, a hollowing out, of a mechanism that once shaped our lives. Arguably popularity continues to structure visibility but perhaps far fewer people believe it signals things of real value or offers legitimacy any more.

And it seems a growing number of thinkers and activists are attempting to operate outside the parameters of popularity (whilst not leveraging ‘unpopularity), rehabilitating this away from notions of failure, and more as a strategic and ethical stance. Laura Portwood-Stacer’s work shows how for some groups it is a form of political integrity to avoid visibility, using inaccessible jargon to have higher barriers to entry, and designing lifestyles that resist easy co-option. This is also reflected in the notion of ‘everyday resistance’ (also named infrapolitics by James C. Scott) which is a quietly invisible and disguised form of resistance to mainstream ideas and thinking.

Interestingly, a recent report on ‘Forth Places’ (versus traditional "third places" - coffee shops, bars, and so on that have long served as informal gathering places,) suggests there is now a ‘URL-to-IRL movement’ to transform online passions into real-world meetups. Importantly for our purposes, 81% of those questioned said they were interested in ‘niche interests’ and 79% of them are drawn to events that combine multiple (of these presumably niche) interests.

We are at an interesting inflection point for popularity, which at the very least suggests it does not have the same potency it once had. This means we need to rethink some of the ways we operate regarding this once unquestioned and ubiquitous human dimension change.

Conclusions

One of the frequently used tools of behavioural science is social norms – which we could read as ‘this behaviour is popular with other people’. This social referent guides our behaviour, as we are motivated to be congruent with the wider population. However, in line with our analysis, we have seen the way that the power of undifferentiated social norms has been challenged, with Betsy Paluk and others suggesting people are much more discriminating about which groups they reference to guide their own behaviour.

Of course, that might be science doing its work of offering more nuanced findings over time, but it may also be that our sensibilities of the way we engage with ‘popularity’ has changed. This would align with the work of psychologists such as Kurt Danziger and Brian Nosek who have argued that psychology too often treats human behaviour as static and universal, when in reality, our mental states and social behaviours are shaped by the time, place, and culture we are in.

This means that what was once a stable driver of behaviour, in our case popularity, may lose its force as contexts shift. Nosek suggests we need epistemological humility, given that our theories are often entangled with the world we aim to describe. So, in our case, as people become aware that popularity can be manufactured, they begin to treat it with scepticism. This creates a feedback loop: the more visible the machinery of influencing popularity, the less effective it becomes.

On this basis the fading potency of popularity may be a sign that our collective psychological environment has evolved. And as practitioners, policy makers and marketers, we likely now need to move beyond social norms and mass signals and toward deeper, more contextual forms of sense making and emotional resonance.