You can skip this if you’ve read the book Nudge and you’re already incensed about the proliferating “most popular” lists on the Web.

But maybe you want your organization to present “most popular” information in a positive way and need some more ammunition. Carl Bialik, “The Numbers Guy” of The Wall Street Journal, recently slammed the growing scourge of “top 10″ news stories on Websites. He went on to cite several well-regarded academic studies explaining why people behave like herd animals.

Here are a few more findings for your collection, from Nudge:

• People who took an easy test and gave the answers on their own were almost always right, but when everyone else gave an incorrect answer, the test subjects made mistakes more than one-third of the time.

• Asked to pick the most important problem facing the country, only 12 percent chose “subversive activities” on their own, but when shown a phony group consensus for that option, the percentage shot up to 48 percent.

• Additional studies in the same vein help to explain the origins of Nazism, in case you’re not depressed enough already.

But there is a silver lining. You can use herd tendencies to achieve socially desirable ends. Suppose you own a hotel and want guests to save water by using their towels for a second day instead of requesting fresh ones. As Carl Bialik reports, it’s simple. Just post a sign saying that towel reuse was the No. 1 choice among other guests. You’ll get 34 percent more compliance than if your sign stresses impact on the environment. Of course, word the sign carefully (”Among the guests we asked, more people said …”) because lying in the interest of social betterment is still lying.

Posted in Persuasion