Popularity Feedback Constrains Innovation in Cultural Markets

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that popularity feedback in cultural markets reduces diversity and slows innovation by influencing both selection and creation processes, leading to less disruptive modifications and delayed aesthetic improvements.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on how popularity ratings constrain cultural diversity and innovation in online creative markets, highlighting the mediating role of feedback loops.

Findings

Popularity feedback triggers cumulative advantage, reducing diversity.

Participants make fewer disruptive changes when exposed to popularity.

Popularity feedback delays aesthetic improvements.

Abstract

Real-world creative processes ranging from art to science rely on social feedback-loops between selection and creation. Yet, the effects of popularity feedback on collective creativity remain poorly understood. We investigate how popularity ratings influence cultural dynamics in a large-scale online experiment where participants ($N = 1\,008$) iteratively \textit{select} images from evolving markets and \textit{produce} their own modifications. Results show that exposing the popularity of images reduces cultural diversity and slows innovation, delaying aesthetic improvements. These findings are mediated by alterations of both selection and creation. During selection, popularity information triggers cumulative advantage, with participants preferentially building upon popular images, reducing diversity. During creation, participants make less disruptive changes, and are more likely to expand existing visual patterns. Feedback loops in cultural markets thus not only shape selection, but also, directly or indirectly, the form and direction of cultural innovation.