Self-serving incentives impair collective decisions by increasing conformity
Self-serving incentives impair collective decisions by increasing conformity
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0224725
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发表时间：
2019-11-14
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Richardson, Daniel
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bazazi, Sepideh;von Zimmermann, Jorina;Richardson, Daniel
人们发现，大量人员的平均判断始终优于个人的最佳反应。但是，当个人做出集体决策时，是什么激励着他们呢？尽管人们普遍认为个人激励可以促进创造性思维和多样化的解决方案，但激励和奖励在集体智慧中的确切作用仍不清楚。在这里，我们在交互式小组评估任务中检查了集体智慧，其中参与者因其个人或小组的表现而获得奖励。除了检查个人与集体激励结构之外，我们还控制参与者是否可以看到有关其他人反应的社会信息。我们发现，了解其他人的反应会降低群体的智慧，而且最重要的是，这种影响取决于人们如何获得奖励。当参与者因个人反应的准确性而获得奖励时，他们会趋向于群体平均值，从而增加了社会一致性，减少了多样性，从而削弱了他们的群体智慧。当他们的集体表现得到奖励时，意见的多样性和团队智慧就会增加。我们的结论是，个人激励和个人主义观点之间的直观联系需要修正。
The average judgment of large numbers of people has been found to be consistently better than the best individual response. But what motivates individuals when they make collective decisions? While it is a popular belief that individual incentives promote out-of-thebox thinking and diverse solutions, the exact role of motivation and reward in collective intelligence remains unclear. Here we examined collective intelligence in an interactive group estimation task where participants were rewarded for their individual or group's performance. In addition to examining individual versus collective incentive structures, we controlled whether participants could see social information about the others' responses. We found that knowledge about others' responses reduced the wisdom of the crowd and, crucially, this effect depended on how people were rewarded. When rewarded for the accuracy of their individual responses, participants converged to the group mean, increasing social conformity, reducing diversity and thereby diminishing their group wisdom. When rewarded for their collective performance, diversity of opinions and the group wisdom increased. We conclude that the intuitive association between individual incentives and individualist opinion needs revising.