Social and Communication Psychology, Georg-Elias-Müller-Institute for Psychology, Georg-August-University Göttingen, Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany.
PLoS One. 2021 Nov 16;16(11):e0259963. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0259963. eCollection 2021.
This study investigates if and under which conditions humans are able to identify and follow the most advantageous leader who will them provide with the most resources. In an iterated economic game with the aim of earning monetary reward, 150 participants were asked to repeatedly choose one out of four leaders. Unbeknownst to participants, the leaders were computer-controlled and programmed to yield different expected payout values that participants had to infer from repeated interaction over 30 rounds. Additionally, participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: single, independent, or cohesion. The conditions were designed to investigate the ideal circumstances that lead to identifying the most advantageous leader: when participants are alone (single condition), in a group that lets individuals sample information about leaders independently (independent condition), or in a group that is rewarded for cohesive behavior (cohesion condition). Our results show that participants are generally able to identify the most advantageous leader. However, participants who were incentivized to act cohesively in a group were more likely to settle on a less advantageous leader. This suggests that cohesion might have a detrimental effect on group decision making. To test the validity of this finding, we explore possible explanations for this pattern, such as the length of exploration and exploitation phases, and present techniques to check for confounding factors in group experiments in order to identify or exclude them as alternative explanations. Finally, we show that the chosen reward structure of the game strongly affects the observed following behavior in the group and possibly occludes other effects. We conclude with a recommendation to carefully choose reward structures and evaluate possible alternative explanations in experimental group research that should further pursue the study of exploration/exploitation phases and the influence of group cohesion on group decision making as promising topics for further research.
本研究旨在探讨人类是否能够识别并追随最有利的领导者，从而获得最多的资源。在一项旨在获得货币奖励的迭代经济游戏中，150 名参与者被要求反复从四名领导者中选择一名。参与者并不知道，这些领导者是由计算机控制和编程的，他们的预期收益值不同，参与者需要通过 30 轮的重复互动来推断。此外，参与者被随机分配到三种条件之一：单独、独立或凝聚。这些条件旨在研究导致识别最有利领导者的理想情况：当参与者单独（单独条件）、在一个允许个体独立获取领导者信息的群体中（独立条件），或者在一个因凝聚力行为而受到奖励的群体中（凝聚条件）时。我们的结果表明，参与者通常能够识别出最有利的领导者。然而，在群体中因凝聚力行为而受到激励的参与者更有可能选择一个不太有利的领导者。这表明凝聚力可能对群体决策产生不利影响。为了检验这一发现的有效性，我们探讨了这种模式的可能解释，例如探索和利用阶段的长度，并提出了检查群体实验中混杂因素的技术，以确定或排除它们作为替代解释。最后，我们表明，游戏中选择的奖励结构强烈影响了群体中观察到的追随行为，并可能掩盖了其他影响。我们的结论是，建议在实验性群体研究中仔细选择奖励结构，并评估可能的替代解释，这应该进一步探索探索/利用阶段以及群体凝聚力对群体决策的影响，作为进一步研究的有前途的主题。
