Definition
The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.
Classification reasoning
There is always a temptation to use trending technologies. When having to decide from a set of alternatives, the market trends often dictate the decision-making.
Example
There are plenty of programming languages based on javascript in the market. Typescript has been increasing in popularity and in the current market, the temptation would be to follow the trends. There is a tendency for people to migrate from vanilla js to typescript in case of existing projects or choose Typescript initially when implementing a new project.
Impact
Using latest technology does not always ensure success. In case the technology is not supported well, or it has a strong competitor, then the technology may not survive. An example of javascript based language is CoffeeScript which has been facing a decline in spite of its popularity at one point.
Debiasing techniques
While it is important to keep up to date with the latest trends, it is important to remember that it does not always pay off. Keep track of competition and try to foresee which technology will have a longer lifetime based on factors such as the companies which are supporting the languages, the size of the contributing community and so on and make a rational decision instead of just following the trends.
Related biases
- Pro-innovation bias (The tendency to have an excessive optimism towards an invention or innovation's usefulness throughout society, while often failing to identify its limitations and weaknesses.)