Culture, Affect, and Social Influence in Decision-Making Groups

Author(s):  
Lu Wang ◽  
Lorna Doucet ◽  
Gregory Northcraft
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Bogert ◽  
Aaron Schecter ◽  
Richard T. Watson

AbstractAlgorithms have begun to encroach on tasks traditionally reserved for human judgment and are increasingly capable of performing well in novel, difficult tasks. At the same time, social influence, through social media, online reviews, or personal networks, is one of the most potent forces affecting individual decision-making. In three preregistered online experiments, we found that people rely more on algorithmic advice relative to social influence as tasks become more difficult. All three experiments focused on an intellective task with a correct answer and found that subjects relied more on algorithmic advice as difficulty increased. This effect persisted even after controlling for the quality of the advice, the numeracy and accuracy of the subjects, and whether subjects were exposed to only one source of advice, or both sources. Subjects also tended to more strongly disregard inaccurate advice labeled as algorithmic compared to equally inaccurate advice labeled as coming from a crowd of peers.


2021 ◽  
pp. 105-122
Author(s):  
Craig J. Bryan

This chapter argues that suicide can be more usefully understood as a consequence of decision-making processes that are vulnerable to environmental and social influence rather than a consequence of internal states or traits such as mental illness. Mental illness and emotional distress more generally are better understood as one particular context within which the decision to make a suicide attempt or not often presents itself, but this does not mean that mental illness is the only context within which this choice is considered. This also does not mean that mental illness causes suicide. The basic concept involved in the marshmallow experiment—decision-making under different conditions—has received increased attention in the past decade among suicide researchers. Studies reveal that the decision-making process of someone who almost died as a result of a suicide attempt was no different from the decision-making process of someone who had never attempted suicide, was not currently suicidal, and did not have a mental illness. This finding lines up with the idea that there can be multiple pathways to suicide.


2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 497-521
Author(s):  
Jiawei Sophia Fu ◽  
Michelle Shumate ◽  
Noshir Contractor

Abstract This study examines the processes of complex innovation adoption in an interorganizational system. It distinguishes the innovation adoption mechanisms of organizational-decision-makers (ODMs), who make authority adoption decisions on behalf of an organization, from individual-decision-makers (IDMs), who make optional innovation decisions in their own work practice. Drawing on the Theory of Reasoned Action and Social Information Processing Theory, we propose and test a theoretical model of interorganizational social influence. We surveyed government health-care workers, whose advice networks mostly span organizational boundaries, across 1,849 state health agencies in Bihar, India. The collective attitudes of coworkers and advice network members influence health-care workers’ attitudes and perceptions of social norms toward four types of innovations. However, individuals’ decision-making authority moderates these relationships; advisors’ attitudes have a greater influence on ODMs, while perceptions of social norms only influence IDMs. Notably, heterogeneity of advisors’ and coworkers’ attitudes negatively influence IDMs’ evaluations of innovations but not ODMs’.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (12) ◽  
pp. 1585-1601 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriele Chierchia ◽  
Blanca Piera Pi-Sunyer ◽  
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

Adolescence is associated with heightened social influence, especially from peers. This can lead to detrimental decision-making in domains such as risky behavior but may also raise opportunities for prosocial behavior. We used an incentivized charitable-donations task to investigate how people revise decisions after learning about the donations of others and how this is affected by age ( N = 220; age range = 11–35 years). Our results showed that the probability of social influence decreased with age within this age range. In addition, whereas previous research has suggested that adults are more likely to conform to the behavior of selfish others than to the behavior of prosocial others, here we observed no evidence of such an asymmetry in midadolescents. We discuss possible interpretations of these findings in relation to the social context of the task, the perceived value of money, and social decision-making across development.


2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (6) ◽  
pp. 941-956
Author(s):  
Wijnand AP van Tilburg ◽  
Nikhila Mahadevan

We examined the impact of viewing exemplars on people’s behaviour in risky decision-making environments. Specifically, we tested if people disproportionally choose to view and then imitate the behaviour of successful (vs. unsuccessful) others, which in the case of risky decision-making increases risk-taking and can hamper performance. In doing so, our research tested how a fundamental social psychological process (social influence) interacts with a fundamental statistical phenomenon (regression to the mean) to produce biases in decision-making. Experiment 1 ( N = 96) showed that people indeed model their own behaviour after that of a successful exemplar, resulting in more risky behaviour and poorer outcomes. Experiment 2 ( N = 208) indicated that people disproportionately choose to examine and then imitate most successful versus least successful exemplars. Experiment 3 ( N = 381) replicated Experiment 2 in a context where participants were offered the freedom to examine any possible exemplar, or no exemplar whatsoever, and across different incentive conditions. The results have implications for decision-making in a broad range of social contexts, such as education, health, and finances where risk-taking can have detrimental outcomes, and they may be particularly helpful to understand the role of social influence in gambling behaviour.


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