Collective communication and behaviour in response to uncertain 'Danger' in network experiments.

Hirokazu Shirado,Forrest W Crawford,Nicholas A Christakis

doi:10.1098/rspa.2019.0685

Hirokazu Shirado, Forrest W Crawford + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2019.0685

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Abstract

In emergencies, social coordination is especially challenging. People connected with each other may respond better or worse to an uncertain danger than isolated individuals. We performed experiments involving a novel scenario simulating an unpredictable situation faced by a group in which 2480 subjects in 108 groups had to both communicate information and decide whether to ‘evacuate’. We manipulated the permissible sorts of interpersonal communication and varied group topology and size. Compared to groups of isolated individuals, we find that communication networks suppress necessary evacuations because of the spontaneous and diffuse emergence of false reassurance; yet, communication networks also restrain unnecessary evacuations in situations without disasters. At the individual level, subjects have thresholds for responding to social information that are sensitive to the negativity, but not the actual accuracy, of the signals being transmitted. Social networks can function poorly as pathways for inconvenient truths that people would rather ignore.

Highlights

Collective dangers––including epidemics [1,2], economic crises, and natural and human-caused disasters [3,4,5]—pose a grave challenge to human coordination and communication
People like to stick with the status quo––because taking protective actions involves economic and psychological costs [12]
Various dilemmas can arise; for instance, taking time to be correct collectively can increase an individual’s risk of being adversely affected

Summary

Introduction

Collective dangers––including epidemics [1,2], economic crises, and natural and human-caused disasters [3,4,5]—pose a grave challenge to human coordination and communication. We focus on the interplay between interpersonal communication (regarding what participants indicate is happening) and behavioural decisions (regarding whether to ‘evacuate’), which is critical in this type of situation [6,24] This interplay between communication and action may depend on the structure of social networks [25,26,27,28]. Our approach supplements observational field studies [5], and our experiments provide systematic measurement of social contagion both when an uncertain danger materializes and when it does not Within this randomized controlled setting, we explore the spontaneous emergence of true and false information about the ‘danger’ and the impact of the propagation of this information on individual and collective behaviour

Experiment set-up

Results

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Discussion