Abstract
The recent developments of social networks and recommender systems have dramatically increased the amount of social information shared in human communities, challenging the human ability to process it. As a result, sharing aggregated forms of social information is becoming increasingly popular. However, it is unknown whether sharing aggregated information improves people’s judgments more than sharing the full available information. Here, we compare the performance of groups in estimation tasks when social information is fully shared versus when it is first averaged and then shared. We find that improvements in estimation accuracy are comparable in both cases. However, our results reveal important differences in subjects’ behaviour: (i) subjects follow the social information more when receiving an average than when receiving all estimates, and this effect increases with the number of estimates underlying the average; (ii) subjects follow the social information more when it is higher than their personal estimate than when it is lower. This effect is stronger when receiving all estimates than when receiving an average. We introduce a model that sheds light on these effects, and confirms their importance for explaining improvements in estimation accuracy in all treatments.
Highlights
Social information is a crucial component of human and animal decisionmaking [1,2]
We have compared the performance of groups in estimation tasks, when subjects received either all the available social information (τ estimates from other group members) or an aggregated version of it
We found that subjects follow social information substantially more when receiving the average estimate of other group members (Aggregated treatment), than when receiving a series of their individual estimates (Sorted and Unsorted treatments)
Summary
Social information is a crucial component of human and animal decisionmaking [1,2]. Most of people’s everyday choices, whether picking a movie or a restaurant, finding the best school for their children or gathering information before voting in an election, are influenced by the experiences and opinions of others [3]. When selecting a restaurant, a travel destination or a hotel, the first thing one often does is look at others’ ratings and reviews This permanent exchange of social information, generally mediated by digital interfaces, is likely to amplify in the coming years, with new generations being born and raised with smartphones and the Internet. This brings about new challenges, such as how to process so much information and make efficient judgments, especially given people’s limited time and cognitive resources [11,12,13]. From a pure information theoretic perspective, having more or better quality information should lead to better decisions, more complex information may challenge human cognitive limits
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