Personal Decision Making Increases Commitment to Outcomes
In class we learned about information cascades, also known as the herding phenomenon, which involves a person making the same decision as that of the majority of the population regardless of any private information that is received. This occurs because by seeing what the majority has decided on, the person infers that the choices of the population may be more powerful than the limited private information known to him.
Although someone may make a decision based on what others have previously chosen, it does not necessarily mean that person will strongly defend that final decision. Scott Keller analyzes the relationship between people making their own choices and their corresponding motivation level in his Harvard Business Review blog. Keller references a famous experiment in which half the participants were assigned a lottery number and the other half were allowed to choose their own lottery number. The researchers then offered to buy back the tickets before the winning number was drawn. They found that they would have to pay at least five times more to buy back tickets from those who were given the opportunity to write their own number than from those who were merely assigned a random number. This result implies that people tend to be more committed to the outcomes of their choices when they have the freedom to make their own selection. Keller then discusses examples where this idea is applied to business; for example, a former CEO of IBM asked over 50,000 of its employees to assist in rewriting the company’s values, which resulted in employees being more dedicated in striving toward those values.
So what we see here is that although certain members are highly influenced by the decisions of others while making their own in an information cascade, they may not feel as passionate about their end decision if it is different from their original answer. The implication is that information cascades are rather fragile. We already knew that this phenomenon can be initiated by very few people, but could not conclude how strongly the followers feel about the decisions they make. Keller argues that by allowing someone to choose for himself, he will feel a strong attachment to his answer and is thus more likely to stand by that decision. So if a group of people wanted to choose A instead of B but ended up picking B because of what the first few people chose, they could potentially change their minds given the right provocation. The extra trigger needed to help them go with their original choice could be something as simple as finding someone else who also strongly believes that choice A is better but didn’t want to be alone in his selection. Figuring out the factors that can stop a cascade is an intriguing next step to research.
– jc
Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/04/increase_your_teams_motivation.html