Self-serving incentives impair collective decisions by increasing conformity

The average judgment of large numbers of people has been found to be consistently better than the best individual response. But what motivates individuals when they make collective decisions? While it is a popular belief that individual incentives promote out-of-the-box thinking and diverse solution...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2019-11, Vol.14 (11), p.e0224725
Main Authors: Bazazi, Sepideh, von Zimmermann, Jorina, Bahrami, Bahador, Richardson, Daniel
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accuracy
Adolescent
Adult
Bias
Biology and Life Sciences
Decision making
Decision Making - physiology
Decisions
Estimates
Experimental psychology
Female
Humans
Incentives
Intelligence
Intelligence (information)
Intelligence - physiology
Judgment - physiology
Knowledge
Male
Motivation
Motivation - physiology
Multimedia industry
Psychology
Reinforcement
Research and Analysis Methods
Social Behavior
Social networks
Social Sciences
Society
Swarm intelligence
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Summary:The average judgment of large numbers of people has been found to be consistently better than the best individual response. But what motivates individuals when they make collective decisions? While it is a popular belief that individual incentives promote out-of-the-box thinking and diverse solutions, the exact role of motivation and reward in collective intelligence remains unclear. Here we examined collective intelligence in an interactive group estimation task where participants were rewarded for their individual or group's performance. In addition to examining individual versus collective incentive structures, we controlled whether participants could see social information about the others' responses. We found that knowledge about others' responses reduced the wisdom of the crowd and, crucially, this effect depended on how people were rewarded. When rewarded for the accuracy of their individual responses, participants converged to the group mean, increasing social conformity, reducing diversity and thereby diminishing their group wisdom. When rewarded for their collective performance, diversity of opinions and the group wisdom increased. We conclude that the intuitive association between individual incentives and individualist opinion needs revising.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0224725