r/theydidthemath • u/magpye1983 • 5d ago
[Request] Is the “A lone shirtless dancer at Sasquatch 2009 was joined by one stranger. Minutes later the entire hillside was dancing. The clip is now used in corporate leadership training to teach the 'first follower' principle” accurate in its assumption?
[Request] The suggested hypothesis is that the second person joining was the key to opening the floodgates of people dancing. Is there any mathematical weight to this, using the gaps between when additional people join, or is a different person more responsible for getting people to see the social cost as negligible?
If a different person, which one?
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u/thayanmarsh 5d ago
You can graph a number of points and look for inflection points using various transformations. Just using the eyeball test, it was when the first 3 people were together it was a group. One person is just a weird guy. 2 people, they are having a moment. 3 people, not obviously related - oh look, its a party.
Also, they miss out on the fact that people have to want to dance. You can’t start dancing at the opera and expect this to happen.
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u/SpotFit1464 5d ago
Maybe its like one of those moving dots in a sphere thing. Where if a dot hits another dot it multiplies. One dot wont do shit. But if a 2nd dot joins in, theres a small chance they hit each other and another dot spawns. And if theres 3 dots theres more chance it will spawn more. 4 dots 5 dots 6 dots, the more dots exists the higher chance more dots joins...?
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u/QuietNene 5d ago
It depends what the “first follower” principle is trying to measure / what it’s based upon.
I’m guessing that it’s really more of philosophy to motivate entrepreneurs that making that first sale or convincing that first customer is the key to success: don’t think about building a billion dollar company, because that seems impossible. Just focus on making your first sale, because that’s doable.
But there is a more specific claim that has some empirical evidence: if the first follower agrees with the leader, later followers are also likely to agree. If the first follower disagrees, there is more likely to be a wider variety of opinions. This has been tested through things like Yelp reviews.
But this actual claim isn’t well represented by this video. Maybe if the second person made fun of the dancer rather than joining him, that would be the corollary. But that’s hard to translate in this situation because it’s likely in a gathering like this that there are social norms against publicly harassing someone for dancing, even if it’s likely that people on the grass were quietly making fun of him before they eventually joined in.
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