Information Cascade

The cascade has three moving parts: an initially visible claim, people who copy or reason from it, and later observers who mistake those dependent repetitions for corroboration. Apparent consensus grows while the amount of independent evidence stays flat. The same dependence can shape judgment in real time: once the first interviewer frames a candidate positively or negatively, later interviewers ask questions through that frame, producing assessments that seem separate but share the same starting assumption. This is Correlated Error disguised as agreement.

Agreement becomes meaningful when judgments are genuinely independent or when later accounts add new evidence. The model warns against counting echoes as witnesses; it does not imply that every repeated claim is false or that an early impression must be wrong.