Organizational Behavior Unit, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02163.
Information Systems Department, Questrom School of Business, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215;
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018 Aug 28;115(35):8734-8739. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1802407115. Epub 2018 Aug 13.
People influence each other when they interact to solve problems. Such social influence introduces both benefits (higher average solution quality due to exploitation of existing answers through social learning) and costs (lower maximum solution quality due to a reduction in individual exploration for novel answers) relative to independent problem solving. In contrast to prior work, which has focused on how the presence and network structure of social influence affect performance, here we investigate the effects of time. We show that when social influence is intermittent it provides the benefits of constant social influence without the costs. Human subjects solved the canonical traveling salesperson problem in groups of three, randomized into treatments with constant social influence, intermittent social influence, or no social influence. Groups in the intermittent social-influence treatment found the optimum solution frequently (like groups without influence) but had a high mean performance (like groups with constant influence); they learned from each other, while maintaining a high level of exploration. Solutions improved most on rounds with social influence after a period of separation. We also show that storing subjects' best solutions so that they could be reloaded and possibly modified in subsequent rounds-a ubiquitous feature of personal productivity software-is similar to constant social influence: It increases mean performance but decreases exploration.
当人们互动解决问题时，他们会相互影响。与独立解决问题相比，这种社会影响带来了好处（通过社会学习利用现有答案提高了平均解决方案的质量）和成本（由于个体对新答案的探索减少，最大解决方案的质量降低）。与之前专注于社会影响的存在和网络结构如何影响绩效的工作不同，我们在这里研究时间的影响。我们表明，当社会影响是间歇性的时候，它提供了恒定社会影响的好处，而没有成本。人类主体在三人一组中解决了标准的旅行商问题，并随机分配到具有恒定社会影响、间歇性社会影响或没有社会影响的处理组中。间歇性社会影响处理组中的群体经常找到最优解（就像没有影响的群体一样），但平均表现较高（就像有恒定影响的群体一样）；他们相互学习，同时保持高水平的探索。在一段时间的隔离后，有社会影响的回合中解决方案的改进最大。我们还表明，存储主体的最佳解决方案以便可以在后续回合中重新加载并可能修改——这是个人生产力软件的常见功能——类似于恒定的社会影响：它提高了平均表现，但降低了探索。
