Why You Drop a Trend When Others Join
People abandon a trend when a group they do not want to be mistaken for takes it up. A study with yellow wristbands in a university dorm showed how.
Key takeaways
- In a 2008 field study by Jonah Berger and Chip Heath, students abandoned yellow charity wristbands after a dorm they saw as geeky adopted them.
- People diverge most from groups they see as unlike themselves, and mainly for choices that are visible and driven by taste.
- Marilynn Brewer's 1991 optimal distinctiveness theory explains why: people balance a need to belong against a need to be distinct.
Why would anyone stop doing something they liked, at the very moment more people started liking it too? A trend you picked up early can feel like yours. Then the people next door take it up, and the jacket, the band or the café that once said something about you starts saying something about them. Most of us have dropped a trend for exactly that reason, and few of us would put it that way.
One of the cleanest tests of the question took place in a university dormitory, with a box of yellow wristbands, and a dormitory next door.
The yellow wristbands in one university dorm
Jonah Berger tells the story in Invisible Influence, at pages 111 to 114. In the first person, as he does with all his own work in that book, he writes that Stanford professor Chip Heath and he "got into the wristband business". Yellow rubber wristbands were a trend at the time, sold for a cancer charity. The two researchers sold them in one dormitory. Then they sold the same bands to the dormitory next door, which had a reputation on campus as the geeky one.
What happened next is the point of the study. Students in the first dorm began taking their bands off.
Nothing about the band had changed.
It cost the same, supported the same cause and looked the same on a wrist. What had changed was who else was wearing it, and so what wearing it said.
The book gives a figure for how many abandoned the band, which appears to come from an earlier working version of the research, and attaches no citation to the study at all: the note beneath it records only that the money went to a cancer charity. The study was published, with Heath as co-author, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2008, under the title "Who drives divergence?". The published paper is where we checked the study, and because the precise rates appear only in that earlier working version, we leave them out. The direction is clear without them.
That paper reports seven studies. The wristband test is the field study, and the others test which groups and which tastes produce the effect. Across them, people moved away from tastes that groups they did not want to be confused with had taken up.
None of the participants needed to dislike the geeky dorm for this to work. They only needed to not want to be mistaken for it. A trend works as a signal, and a signal that more and more of the wrong people are sending stops carrying the message you bought it for.
The pattern has a name. Berger and Heath call it divergence, and they describe it as identity signalling: choices that others can see get read as claims about who you are, so people manage them the way they would manage any other claim.
Why the people next door decide what your choice says
The question is why some choices behave like this and others do not. Nobody stops buying a brand of washing-up liquid because a neighbour they find dull has started using it too.
Berger's answer, in chapter three of Invisible Influence, has two parts. A choice is read as an identity claim when other people can see it, and when it is a matter of taste rather than function. Clothes, music, hairstyles and names pass both tests. Washing-up liquid fails both. So divergence should be strongest for visible, taste-driven choices, and weakest for private or practical ones.
The book's best illustration is a clothing retailer that publicly offered to pay a reality television star not to wear its clothes. Whatever the motive, the offer only makes sense if the brand believed the wrong wearer could change what its clothes meant.
So popularity alone is not the trigger.
The second part is who the others are. In the 2008 studies, people diverged most from groups they saw as dissimilar to themselves. A trend taken up by people like you can feel like confirmation. The same trend taken up by people unlike you can feel like contamination.
> A trend is a message. When the wrong people start sending it, the message changes, and the person who sent it first is often the one who stops.
That makes the abandonment more rational than it first looks. If clothes or music are partly a way of telling strangers which group you belong to, then a trend adopted by a group you are not part of is a broken signal. Switching is a way of repairing it.
Following a trend because others do and abandoning it because others do are not opposites. Both hand the decision to the crowd.
For a business, the uncomfortable lesson is that growth can be the thing that undoes a trend. For a shopper, the lesson is simpler. When you suddenly go off something you liked, it is worth asking whether you went off the thing, or off the company it now keeps.
Wanting to belong and to stand apart
A second line of research explains why the answer is not simply to be as different as possible. In 1991 Marilynn Brewer set out what she called optimal distinctiveness theory in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Her proposal was that people hold two opposing needs at once: a need to belong, which pulls them towards groups, and a need to be distinct, which pushes them away from being merely one of the crowd. Social identities feel best at the point where the two balance.
Applied to a trend, that gives a clean prediction. Early on, when a trend is held by a small group, it satisfies both needs. You are part of something, and the something is distinctive. As it spreads, the belonging grows and the distinctiveness shrinks, until at some point the balance tips and the early adopters start looking for the next thing. Berger and Heath's studies add a refinement: the balance tips sooner when the newcomers belong to a group the early adopters do not want to be confused with.
The theory also explains why people rarely leap to something nobody else does. Total distinctiveness costs belonging. The usual move is sideways, to a smaller trend held by a group you are happy to be associated with, rather than to complete eccentricity.
People who abandon one trend tend to land on another.
There is a commercial version of the same tension. Brands that sell on being exclusive need to be popular enough to survive and rare enough to keep meaning something. Mass-market brands face the opposite problem, and mostly do not need to care who else is buying. Which kind of brand you are buying from tells you how much the company will care if your sort of person stops buying it.
Brewer's theory was not built for shopping. Its value here is that it explains why abandonment and adoption are two halves of the same movement rather than two different kinds of behaviour.
The ledger of what is known and still open
It is worth setting out what this evidence supports and what it does not.
What it supports is the direction. People do move away from visible, taste-driven choices when a group they see as unlike themselves takes them up, and the 2008 studies show this in both the field and the laboratory. The idea that choices are read as identity claims is well established, and Brewer's theory gives a coherent account of why both belonging and difference matter at the same time.
What it does not support is any precise size. The studies were small, mostly run at one university, and conducted before the era of large preregistered replications. We have found no attempt to replicate them in either direction. Our own review of the research rates it as unrefuted rather than confirmed, and that is the fair description.
What remains open is how this works online, where trends move faster and the groups adopting them are harder to see. A wristband in a dormitory has an obvious audience. A trend on a social platform reaches people you will never meet, which may weaken the effect or may strengthen it, and we have found no test of which.
That leaves a real dilemma for anyone who likes being early to things. Dropping a trend when others join is a way of keeping your choices legible as your own. It is also a way of letting other people decide what you wear, listen to and buy, just in reverse. Following a trend because others do and abandoning it because others do are not opposites. Both hand the decision to the crowd. The harder and freer position is to keep liking something after everyone else does. Few of us manage it, and the people who do rarely notice they have.
Common questions
Why do people stop liking something once it becomes popular?
In Jonah Berger and Chip Heath's 2008 studies, people abandoned visible tastes when a group they saw as unlike themselves adopted them, because the choice no longer signalled the identity they wanted. Popularity alone was not the trigger; who became popular with it was.
What is optimal distinctiveness theory?
Marilynn Brewer's 1991 proposal that people balance a need to belong against a need to be distinct, and that social identities feel best where the two meet. It explains why early adopters move on as a trend spreads.
Which choices are most affected?
Choices that are visible to others and driven by taste, such as clothes, music and hairstyles. Practical or private purchases, such as household cleaning products, are much less likely to be abandoned for social reasons.
Has the wristband study been replicated?
We have found no direct replication, in either direction. The 2008 paper reports seven studies including the field study, and the research is best described as unrefuted rather than confirmed.
Sources
Berger, J., & Heath, C. (2008). 'Who drives divergence? Identity signaling, outgroup dissimilarity, and the abandonment of cultural tastes.' Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(3), 593-607. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.95.3.593. Seven studies including the wristband field study. Abandonment rates appear only in a working version and are not printed.
Brewer, M. B. (1991). “The social self: On being the same and different at the same time.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17(5), 475–482.
Berger, J. (2016). Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior. Simon & Schuster. Read in full by this publication, 2026-10-06. Ch. 3, pp. 99-145; the wristband study at pp. 111-114, where the book carries no citation for it.
A note on scope: we have found no replication of the 2008 studies in either direction, and none has been tested on social platforms.