Why Popularity Feels Like Proof of Quality

Normal is always boring… and that’s not a statement meant to claim that being different automatically makes you special, or that anything popular is automatically bad, but it’s an observation about the nature of mass conformity. Because you can find a thousand people just like you, thinking the same way, loving the same things, making the same choices, and that’s an easy thing available to absolutely everyone. Do you like cheap, lowbrow songs? You’ll find millions who do. Do you watch the same lowbrow shows and films? You’ll find millions there too. Do you read best-selling novels just because they’re easy to read and rack up huge downloads and sales? You’ll find plenty of people who already share the same opinion of them.

And that in itself isn’t wrong, because popularity isn’t proof of being bad, but at the same time it isn’t proof of quality either. The problem starts when popularity turns into the standard of judgment — when a work is considered good because it’s popular, not because it actually deserves it.

The Shortcut Kahneman Warned About

This is where some people’s minds take a shortcut: instead of analyzing, comparing, and critiquing, they lean toward the easiest answer — the answer the majority already chose. Daniel Kahneman explained something close to this when he talked about fast thinking: some people, or the herd, to put it more accurately, look for the least mental effort possible, and when they find thousands or millions of people who agree on a certain opinion, they treat the agreement itself as sufficient proof, even if there’s no real analysis behind it.

Gustave Le Bon made a version of this argument more than a century before Kahneman, in his 1895 book “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.” Le Bon argued that people inside a crowd don’t just agree with each other, they start thinking differently than they would alone — individual judgment gets submerged into something closer to a collective mood, spread by contagion rather than reasoning. A crowd doesn’t average out into caution, in Le Bon’s account. It amplifies whatever feeling is already moving through it. Applied to culture, that means a popular work doesn’t necessarily reflect a million careful judgments arriving at the same conclusion. It can just as easily reflect one mood, spreading.

Why the Mainstream Wins

And if we look at any popular work, whether a film, a novel, a show, or even a song, we’ll find that most mass-market works are made specifically to appeal to the widest possible slice of people, and that’s natural, because the market looks for reach before anything else. The simpler the idea, the more direct the emotions, and the less need for reflection or rethinking, the greater the work’s chances of mass success. So the person who comes out of that experience starts inflating the work’s value, comparing it to great works they don’t even understand, simply because their personal feeling is now backed by a collective one.

And this is where the effect of social conformity shows up: some people feel more confident in their opinion the more people they find who share it, even if that opinion was never the product of independent analysis. Which brings us to another point: the moment a work that differs from the mainstream appears, or presents an idea outside the usual mold, it starts getting labeled as boring, or overly complicated, or too philosophical, or “doesn’t make sense” — because it stepped outside the language the audience is used to.

To be fair to crowds, they aren’t always wrong, and the conditions matter more than the size of the group. The statistician Francis Galton once watched a country fair contest where visitors guessed the weight of an ox, and found that while individual guesses were all over the place, the median of everyone’s guess landed remarkably close to the ox’s actual weight. That result, later popularized as the wisdom of crowds, depends on something Le Bon’s mob doesn’t have: people guessing independently, without seeing each other’s answers first, and a mechanism that aggregates rather than caves to the loudest opinion in the room. A bestseller list isn’t that. It’s closer to Le Bon’s crowd, where each new reader’s choice is shaped by the choices they’ve already seen everyone else make.

That’s the actual test worth applying, and it has nothing to do with how many people bought the book or streamed the song. Did a million people arrive at the same judgment independently, the way Galton’s fairgoers guessed a weight before comparing notes? Or did they arrive at it the way a crowd arrives at a mood, each person’s choice visible to the next one before they’d made up their own mind? Popularity built the second way isn’t evidence of anything except how well the reviewing got outsourced. It tells you the herd moved. It doesn’t tell you where.