Social influence in decision-making: game theory edition
Long-time and short-time readers alike know that I’ve been studying game theory and how it affects the design of online communities and marcomm strategy.
Part of applying that is learning to be allocentric about allocentricity, meaning: it’s important to understand how people influence each other, so you can better anticipate how people will behave when they’re putting themselves in others’ shoes.
Here’s a pretty little nugget of wisdom from Yochai Benkler’s new book, The Penguin and the Leviathan (page 171):
..the best way to see that self-interest plays a role in decision-making is to go back to the lab. Economists have long operated under the assumption that the higher the stakes, the more the pursuit of self-interest guides our behavior. This turns out to be wrong.
Across countless experiments of the type I’ve been describing, simply raising the stakes did not in fact significantly change the levels of cooperation — even when experimenters went to poorer countries, where they could make the stakes as high as three months’ wages.
What did make a difference in people’s behavior was the relative cost of cooperating. When the relative gain from acting selfishly…compared to the potential payoff for cooperating, was made smaller, more people cooperated.
In other words, in a game of Prisoner’s Dilemma, if the payoff when both players cooperated was $4, and the payoff to the defector when one defected and one player cooperated was knocked down to say, $6 instead of $9, fewer people defected.
Logically, that change should not have affected the behavior if one were driven purely by self-interest. You are still better off defecting; $6 is still more than $4.
But that isn’t how the subjects in the experiment saw it. At least some people were willing to behave cooperatively at a personal cost to themselves, as long as the cost was not too high…In other words, our willingness to cooperate is sensitive to the price we have to pay for the privilege of cooperating.
In the real world, one of the day-to-day practices that best exhibit this phenomenon is recycling. In cities with recycling programs, compliance is much higher when the municipalities do curbside pickup rather than requiring residents to take recyclables to some central location.
A couple of weeks ago, I published a blog post about related research from HP Labs, “Social Influence in Recommender Systems”…check it out for more on this subject.
