Quantifying the Information Gained from Extra-Network Stimuli: An Experiment on Social Coordination

Abstract

Humans process a wide range of social stimuli that are associated with actors outside of an individual’s ego network. Can these extra- network stimuli carry information that alters receipts’ behavior in socially consequential ways, such as producing shared understandings or facilitating broad social coordination? Research on social influence focuses on the effects of information from network alters and public sources like broadcast media, but research on cognition demonstrates that we extract actionable information from many types of sources and stimuli. In this article, I focus on effects of stimuli from extra-network sources in a large-group coordination experiment and show that participant exposure to a small number of extra-network stimuli can facilitate coordination where network-only information flows do not. Using the Kullback-Leibler measure of information gain, I show that the information gained through these exposures is greater on average than that of a variety of alternatives, including additional bridging ties. This is important evidence that our local social environments beyond our known interlocutors can be explanatorily significant and that attentiveness to extra-network cues can be a comparatively thrifty means of acquiring socially information relevant information.