Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zurich, Weinbergstrasse 58, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland.
Sci Rep. 2013;3:1360. doi: 10.1038/srep01360.
How do humans respond to indirect social influence when making decisions? We analysed an experiment where subjects had to guess the answer to factual questions, having only aggregated information about the answers of others. While the response of humans to aggregated information is a widely observed phenomenon, it has not been investigated quantitatively, in a controlled setting. We found that the adjustment of individual guesses depends linearly on the distance to the mean of all guesses. This is a remarkable, and yet surprisingly simple regularity. It holds across all questions analysed, even though the correct answers differ by several orders of magnitude. Our finding supports the assumption that individual diversity does not affect the response to indirect social influence. We argue that the nature of the response crucially changes with the level of information aggregation. This insight contributes to the empirical foundation of models for collective decisions under social influence.
人类在做决策时如何应对间接社会影响？我们分析了一项实验，实验中，被试者需要猜测事实问题的答案，而他们只能获得其他人答案的汇总信息。虽然人类对汇总信息的反应是一个广泛观察到的现象，但在受控环境中，尚未对其进行定量研究。我们发现，个体猜测的调整与所有猜测平均值的距离呈线性关系。这是一个显著的、但又出人意料的简单规律。它适用于所有分析的问题，即使正确答案相差几个数量级。我们的发现支持了这样一种假设，即个体差异不会影响对间接社会影响的反应。我们认为，这种反应的性质随着信息汇总程度的不同而发生关键变化。这一观点为社会影响下的集体决策模型提供了经验基础。
