Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, 14195 Berlin, Germany;
Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, 14195 Berlin, Germany.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Apr 18;114(16):4117-4122. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1611998114. Epub 2017 Apr 3.
In recent years, a large body of research has demonstrated that judgments and behaviors can propagate from person to person. Phenomena as diverse as political mobilization, health practices, altruism, and emotional states exhibit similar dynamics of social contagion. The precise mechanisms of judgment propagation are not well understood, however, because it is difficult to control for confounding factors such as homophily or dynamic network structures. We introduce an experimental design that renders possible the stringent study of judgment propagation. In this design, experimental chains of individuals can revise their initial judgment in a visual perception task after observing a predecessor's judgment. The positioning of a very good performer at the top of a chain created a performance gap, which triggered waves of judgment propagation down the chain. We evaluated the dynamics of judgment propagation experimentally. Despite strong social influence within pairs of individuals, the reach of judgment propagation across a chain rarely exceeded a social distance of three to four degrees of separation. Furthermore, computer simulations showed that the speed of judgment propagation decayed exponentially with the social distance from the source. We show that information distortion and the overweighting of other people's errors are two individual-level mechanisms hindering judgment propagation at the scale of the chain. Our results contribute to the understanding of social-contagion processes, and our experimental method offers numerous new opportunities to study judgment propagation in the laboratory.
近年来，大量研究表明，判断和行为可以在人与人之间传播。从政治动员到健康行为、利他主义和情绪状态等各种现象都表现出类似的社会传染动态。然而，由于难以控制同质性或动态网络结构等混杂因素，因此对判断传播的精确机制仍了解甚少。我们引入了一种实验设计，使得严格研究判断传播成为可能。在这种设计中，实验链中的个体可以在观察到前一个人的判断后，在视觉感知任务中修改他们的初始判断。在链条顶部设置一个表现非常出色的人会造成表现差距，从而引发判断沿着链条向下传播的浪潮。我们通过实验评估了判断传播的动态。尽管个体之间存在强烈的社会影响，但判断传播的范围很少超过三到四个社交距离的程度。此外，计算机模拟表明，判断传播的速度随来源的社交距离呈指数衰减。我们表明，信息扭曲和对他人错误的过分重视是阻碍链条层面判断传播的两个个体层面机制。我们的研究结果有助于理解社会传染过程，而我们的实验方法为在实验室中研究判断传播提供了许多新的机会。
