Going with the crowd in volatile times: Exposure to environmental variability increases people's preference for popular options

More extreme temperature and precipitation events are defining features of climate change, and higher volatility in asset prices is a defining feature of globalization. Four experiments (two preregistered; total N = 2086) found that exposure to a high degree of variability in a given domain shifted people's preferences toward more popular products, that is, products rated by a larger number of consumers. This finding replicated across different experimental manipulations of variability, including graphs depicting either high or low variability in annual rainfall or temperature (Experiments 1 and 2), and in the experienced outcomes of dice rolls, which were manipulated to be perceived as having high or low variability (Experiment 3). The results generalized across different consumer choices, including services (Experiment 1) and products (Experiments 2 and 3). After exposure to higher variability, participants who received a more popular but lower rated option felt less anxious than those who received a less popular but higher rated option, indicating that choosing popular products serves to reduce the anxiety induced by higher variability (Experiment 4). This research highlights both a novel consequence of exposure to greater variability and a novel antecedent of people's preference for popular options.