# Bandwagon Effect

## Definition
A psychological phenomenon where people adopt beliefs or actions because they see others doing the same, regardless of the underlying evidence. In multi-agent systems, it causes agents to converge on popular answers rather than independently reasoning to correct conclusions.

## Risk in Multi-Agent Consensus
- Agents may be influenced by implicit ordering or presentation of options
- If one answer appears first or is more salient, later agents may favor it
- The effect can override actual reasoning
- Correlated responses reduce the benefit of voting

## Prevention
- Ensure agents are truly independent (no feedback loops)
- Present information in randomized order where applicable
- Use diverse models with different training to reduce shared biases
- Treat the consensus as a blind experiment — agents don't know they're voting

## Key Principle
- Diversity in human systems helps solve novel problems
- The same applies to LLM ensembles
- Different models, different fine-tuning, different prompts
- Maximize variance in responses for maximum cancellation of noise

## Related Concepts
- [[Groupthink]]
- [[Multi-Agent Consensus]]
- [[Sycophancy]]