Social Agenda
Group Size and Incentives to Contribute: A Natural Experiment at Chinese Wikipedia
Xiaoquan Zhang & Feng Zhu
American Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The literature on the private provision of public goods suggests an inverse relationship between incentives to contribute and group size. We find, however, that after an exogenous reduction of group size at Chinese Wikipedia, the non-blocked contributors decrease their contributions by 42.8% on average. We attribute the cause to social effects: Contributors receive social benefits that increase with both the amount of their contributions and group size, and the shrinking group size weakens these social benefits. Consistent with our explanation, we find that the more contributors value social benefits, the more they reduce their contributions after the block.
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Maroš Servátka, Steven Tucker & Radovan Vadovič
Journal of Economic Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Should one use words or money to foster trust of the other party if no means of enforcing trustworthiness are available? This paper reports an experiment studying the effectiveness of two types of mechanisms for promoting trust: a costly gift and a costless message as well as their mutual interaction. We nest our findings in the standard version of the investment game. Our data provide evidence that while both stand-alone mechanisms enhance trust, a gift performs significantly worse than a message. Moreover, when a gift is combined with sending a message, it can be counterproductive.
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Reminders of Money Elicit Feelings of Threat and Reactance in Response to Social Influence
Jia Liu, Dirk Smeesters & Kathleen Vohs
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
When consumers are reminded of money, do they conform, shrug off or react against others' attempts to influence them? Prior research on reminders of money suggests that either of the latter two outcomes is probable. The current research proposed that the self-sufficient motivation induced by money reminders causes consumers to perceive social influences as threats to their autonomy. We predicted that consumers reminded of money would deviate from social influence, an effect that would be caused by feeling threatened. Across three experiments, money-primed participants behaved opposite to the source of influence, displaying reactance stemming from heightened feelings of threat. However, this reactance response was eliminated when money-primed participants were not personally invested in a decision; consequently, they showed indifference in the face of social influence. Hence, reminders of money boost the motivation to be autonomous and sensitize consumers to potential constraints on their personal decision making freedom.
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The power of generosity to change views on social power
Margaret Brown
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Intergroup helping behavior by high status group members typically functions to support and further entrench systems of social hierarchy (Nadler, 2002). This research examined whether the virtue of generosity could increase support for more egalitarian group relations, as indexed by reduced social dominance orientation (SDO; Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, & Malle, 1994). Pilot testing (N = 367) revealed a negative relationship between self-reported generosity and SDO. In Study 1, two long-term experimental manipulations of generosity in 110 college students reduced SDO. One manipulation involved a nine week community service learning project, and the other involved a five-part reflection paper assignment on generous individuals. In Study 2, a brief generosity prime in 58 college students reduced SDO scores. The potential benefits of targeting SDO directly, and the importance of examining the motives behind generosity are discussed.
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How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect
Jan Lorenz et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 31 May 2011, Pages 9020-9025
Abstract:
Social groups can be remarkably smart and knowledgeable when their averaged judgements are compared with the judgements of individuals. Already Galton [Galton F (1907) Nature 75:7] found evidence that the median estimate of a group can be more accurate than estimates of experts. This wisdom of crowd effect was recently supported by examples from stock markets, political elections, and quiz shows [Surowiecki J (2004) The Wisdom of Crowds]. In contrast, we demonstrate by experimental evidence (N = 144) that even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect in simple estimation tasks. In the experiment, subjects could reconsider their response to factual questions after having received average or full information of the responses of other subjects. We compare subjects' convergence of estimates and improvements in accuracy over five consecutive estimation periods with a control condition, in which no information about others' responses was provided. Although groups are initially "wise," knowledge about estimates of others narrows the diversity of opinions to such an extent that it undermines the wisdom of crowd effect in three different ways. The "social influence effect" diminishes the diversity of the crowd without improvements of its collective error. The "range reduction effect" moves the position of the truth to peripheral regions of the range of estimates so that the crowd becomes less reliable in providing expertise for external observers. The "confidence effect" boosts individuals' confidence after convergence of their estimates despite lack of improved accuracy. Examples of the revealed mechanism range from misled elites to the recent global financial crisis.
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Who Follows the Crowd - Groups or Individuals?
René Fahr & Bernd Irlenbusch
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
In games of social learning individuals tend to give too much weight to their own private information relative to the information that is conveyed by the choices of others (Weizsäcker 2010). In this paper we investigate differences between individuals and small groups as decision makers in information cascade situations. In line with results from social psychology as well as results on Bayesian decision making (Charness et al. 2006) we find that groups behave more rationally than individuals. Groups, in particular, are able to abandon their own private signals more often than individuals when it is rational to do so. Our results indicate that the intellective part of the decision task contributes slightly more to the superior performance of groups than the judgmental part. Our findings have potential implications for the design of decision making processes in organisations, finance and other economic settings.
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Getting Even or Being at Odds? Cohesion in Even- and Odd-Sized Small Groups
Tanya Menon & Katherine Phillips
Organization Science, May-June 2011, Pages 738-753
Abstract:
We propose that even-sized small groups often experience lower cohesion than odd-sized small groups. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate this effect within three- to six-person groups of freshman roommates and sibling groups, respectively. Study 3 replicates the basic even/odd effect among three- to five-person groups in a laboratory experiment that examines underlying mechanisms. To account for the even/odd effect, Study 3 focuses on the group's ability to provide members with certainty and identifies majority influence as the key instrument. We argue that groups struggle to provide certainty when they lack majorities (e.g., deadlocked coalitions) or contain unstable majorities (i.e., where small changes in opinion readily overturn existing power arrangements). Member uncertainty mediated the effects of coalition structure on cohesion. The results link structural variables (i.e., even/odd size and coalition structure) to psychological outcomes (i.e., member uncertainty and relational outcomes).
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The Dark Side of the Future: An Experimental Test of Commitment Problems in Bargaining
Dustin Tingley
International Studies Quarterly, June 2011, Pages 521-544
Abstract:
While most existing theoretical and experimental literatures focus on how a high probability of repeated play can lead to more socially efficient outcomes (for instance, using the result that cooperation is possible in a repeated prisoner's dilemma), this paper focuses on the detrimental effects of repeated play - the ''dark side of the future.'' I study a resource division model with repeated interaction and changes in bargaining strength. The model predicts a negative relationship between the likelihood of repeated interaction and social efficiency. This is because the longer shadow of the future exacerbates commitment problems created by changes in bargaining strength. I test and find support for the model using incentivized laboratory experiments. Increases in the likelihood of repeated play lead to more socially inefficient outcomes in the laboratory.
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The benefits of voluntary leadership in experimental public goods games
Fernanda Rivas & Matthias Sutter
Economics Letters, August 2011, Pages 176-178
Abstract:
We study the effects of voluntary leadership in experimental public goods games when each group member can volunteer to contribute before the other members. We find that voluntary leadership increases contributions significantly, compared to a treatment where leadership is enforced exogenously.
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Centralized sanctioning and legitimate authority promote cooperation in humans
Delia Baldassarri & Guy Grossman
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social sanctioning is widely considered a successful strategy to promote cooperation among humans. In situations in which individual and collective interests are at odds, incentives to free-ride induce individuals to refrain from contributing to public goods provision. Experimental evidence from public goods games shows that when endowed with sanctioning powers, conditional cooperators can discipline defectors, thus leading to greater levels of cooperation. However, extant evidence is based on peer punishment institutions, whereas in complex societies, systems of control are often centralized: for instance, we do not sanction our neighbors for driving too fast, the police do. Here we show the effect of centralized sanctioning and legitimate authority on cooperation. We designed an adaptation of the public goods game in which sanctioning power is given to a single monitor, and we experimentally manipulated the process by which the monitor is chosen. To increase the external validity of the study, we conducted lab-in-the-field experiments involving 1,543 Ugandan farmers from 50 producer cooperatives. This research provides evidence of the effectiveness of centralized sanctioning and demonstrates the causal effect of legitimacy on cooperation: participants are more responsive to the authority of an elected monitor than a randomly chosen monitor. Our essay contributes to the literature on the evolution of cooperation by introducing the idea of role differentiation. In complex societies, cooperative behavior is not only sustained by mechanisms of selection and reciprocity among peers, but also by the legitimacy that certain actors derive from their position in the social hierarchy.
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Edith Shalev & Vicki Morwitz
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Ample research shows that consumers accept influence from a source they identify with, and reject influence from a source they wish to dissociate from. The current article moves beyond the well established identification principle and delineates a new influence process. Influence via comparison-driven self evaluation and restoration (CDSER) takes place when one observes a counter-stereotypical product user, and as a result questions one's relative standing on the trait that the product symbolizes. In response to this threatening self evaluation, the observer becomes more interested in the target product. To clearly distinguish CDSER from identification influence, the current investigation focuses on product users from low socioeconomic status (SES). In contrast to the predictions of the identification principle, this article demonstrates that low SES users can in some circumstances positively influence observers and increase their purchase intentions. The "low-status user effect" and the CDSER mechanism are demonstrated across multiple product categories in four studies.
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The group matters: A review of processes and outcomes in intelligence analysis
Susan Straus, Andrew Parker & James Bruce
Group Dynamics, June 2011, Pages 128-146
Abstract:
The work of intelligence analysts is fundamentally cognitive in nature. Intelligence analysis consists largely of identifying problems, generating and evaluating hypotheses, identifying and assessing open source and classified information, recognizing patterns in large sets of data, aggregating information, and providing results in the form of judgments, forecasts, and insights to policymakers. These activities are often conducted by individuals; however, intelligence agencies and experts have called increasingly for the use of teams in intelligence analysis. This article reviews the research literature on group-level phenomena (that is, process losses) that are most relevant to the work of intelligence analysts, including productivity losses in brainstorming, the common knowledge effect, group polarization, confirmation bias, overconfidence, and pressures toward uniformity. We describe how features of intelligence analysis teams' tasks, context, and structure affect these processes, present methods to minimize these process losses and increase process gains, and discuss directions for future research. Although our focus is on intelligence analysis teams, these processes and interventions are relevant to a range of analytical teams that share common characteristics.
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Petru Lucian Curşeu, Sandra Schruijer & Smaranda Boroş
British Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The impact of minority dissent on group-level outcomes is explained in the current literature by two opposing mechanisms: first, through cognitive gains due to a profound change induced by minority members in the individual cognitions of the majority members, and second, through socio-affective process losses due to social rejection and relationship conflict. Groups are most effective in information processing if they succeed in solving this opposition and reduce the negative impact of process losses. The present study addresses this opposition using an experimental design in which we crossed minority dissent (presence vs. absence of minority dissent) with change in membership (groups with vs. groups without change in membership) to determine which condition leads to the highest group cognitive complexity. Our results show that groups with a history of dissent and where the deviant left the group have the highest cognitive complexity, followed by groups that experienced dissent and where no change in group membership took place. The groups without a history of dissent have the lowest cognitive complexity.
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Risk of collective failure provides an escape from the tragedy of the commons
Francisco Santos & Jorge Pacheco
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
From group hunting to global warming, how to deal with collective action may be formulated in terms of a public goods game of cooperation. In most cases, contributions depend on the risk of future losses. Here, we introduce an evolutionary dynamics approach to a broad class of cooperation problems in which attempting to minimize future losses turns the risk of failure into a central issue in individual decisions. We find that decisions within small groups under high risk and stringent requirements to success significantly raise the chances of coordinating actions and escaping the tragedy of the commons. We also offer insights on the scale at which public goods problems of cooperation are best solved. Instead of large-scale endeavors involving most of the population, which as we argue, may be counterproductive to achieve cooperation, the joint combination of local agreements within groups that are small compared with the population at risk is prone to significantly raise the probability of success. In addition, our model predicts that, if one takes into consideration that groups of different sizes are interwoven in complex networks of contacts, the chances for global coordination in an overall cooperating state are further enhanced.
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Trish Ruebottom
Journal of Business Venturing, forthcoming
Abstract:
For social entrepreneurs who seek to change existing community practices, the difficulties in building legitimacy may pose a challenge that compromises their ability to create sustainable institutional change. Case studies of 10 social enterprises reveal that rhetorical strategy aims to overcome this barrier. The findings suggest that the rhetorical strategy used by these enterprises casts the organization as protagonist and those that challenge the change as antagonists. The microstructures underlying this strategy include vocabulary sets that invoke socially accepted meta-narratives, and rhetorical devices that heighten the positive of the protagonist meta-narratives and the negative of the antagonist meta-narratives. The rhetorical strategy weaves together these protagonist and antagonist themes to create tension and persuade the audience of the organization's legitimacy.
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Competitive helping increases with the size of biological markets and invades defection
Pat Barclay
Journal of Theoretical Biology, 21 July 2011, Pages 47-55
Abstract:
Cooperation between unrelated individuals remains a puzzle in evolutionary biology. Recent work indicates that partner choice can select for high levels of helping. More generally, helping can be seen as but one strategy used to compete for partners within a broader biological market, yet giving within such markets has received little mathematical investigation. In the present model, individuals help others to attract attention from them and thus receive a larger share of any help actively or passively provided by those others. The evolutionarily stable level of helping increases with the size of the biological market and the degree of partner choice. Furthermore, if individuals passively produce some no-cost help to partners, competitive helping can then invade populations of non-helpers because helpers directly benefit from increasing their access to potential partners. This framework of competitive helping demonstrates how high helping can be achieved and why different populations may differ in helping levels.
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The 'spiteful' origins of human cooperation
Frank Marlowe et al.
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 22 July 2011, Pages 2159-2164
Abstract:
We analyse generosity, second-party ('spiteful') punishment (2PP), and third-party ('altruistic') punishment (3PP) in a cross-cultural experimental economics project. We show that smaller societies are less generous in the Dictator Game but no less prone to 2PP in the Ultimatum Game. We might assume people everywhere would be more willing to punish someone who hurt them directly (2PP) than someone who hurt an anonymous third person (3PP). While this is true of small societies, people in large societies are actually more likely to engage in 3PP than 2PP. Strong reciprocity, including generous offers and 3PP, exists mostly in large, complex societies that face numerous challenging collective action problems. We argue that 'spiteful' 2PP, motivated by the basic emotion of anger, is more universal than 3PP and sufficient to explain the origins of human cooperation.
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Who is looking at me? The cone of gaze widens in social phobia
Matthias Gamer et al.
Cognition & Emotion, Spring 2011, Pages 756-764
Abstract:
Gaze direction is an important cue that regulates social interactions and facilitates joint attention. Although humans are very accurate in determining gaze directions in general, they have a surprisingly liberal criterion for the presence of mutual gaze. Using an established psychophysical task that required observers to adjust the eyes of a virtual head to the margins of the area of mutual gaze, we examined whether the resulting cone of gaze is altered in people with social phobia. It turned out that during presence of a second virtual person, the gaze cone's width was specifically enlarged in patients with social phobia as compared to healthy controls. The size of this effect was correlated with the severity of social anxiety. As this effect was found for merely virtual lookers, it seems to be a fundamental mechanism rather than a specific effect related to the fear of being observed and evaluated by others.