Abstract
People often make decisions in a social environment. The present work examines social influence on people’s decisions in a sequential decision-making situation. In the first experimental study, we implemented an information cascade paradigm, illustrating that people infer information from decisions of others and use this information to make their own decisions. We followed a cognitive modeling approach to elicit the weight people give to social as compared to private individual information. The proposed social influence model shows that participants overweight their own private information relative to social information, contrary to the normative Bayesian account. In our second study, we embedded the abstract decision problem of Study 1 in a medical decision-making problem. We examined whether in a medical situation people also take others’ authority into account in addition to the information that their decisions convey. The social influence model illustrates that people weight social information differentially according to the authority of other decision makers. The influence of authority was strongest when an authority's decision contrasted with private information. Both studies illustrate how the social environment provides sources of information that people integrate differently for their decisions.
Highlights
Individuals often ignore their own opinion in favor of the opinions of others
For all tasks in which the posterior probability was in favor of one alternative (Scenarios 1–9), 86.9% of all choices were consistent with the Bayesian prediction
In situations where private and public information cancelled each other out, participants preferred private information over public information. These results suggest that private information and socially inferred information are cognitively integrated
Summary
Individuals often ignore their own opinion in favor of the opinions of others. Early experimental results of Asch and Sherif impressively illustrated how the judgments of others influence individuals’ judgments [1,2,3]. People sometimes follow the behavior of others even when they provide inaccurate information. The present article focuses on a decision-making problem in which several individuals sequentially make decisions and have the potential to influence each other. This situation has been studied by economists who focused on conformity behavior that results from the cognitive integration of socially inferred information improving individual decisions [4,5]. Following a cognitive modeling approach, we sought to examine to what extent individual decisions are affected by different types of social influence. We are interested in how socially inferred information and normative expectations of an authority have an impact on individual decisions
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