Crowd Effects in Voting on Survivor
Survivor is a reality competition game show that involves strangers living on an island for 39 days on a deserted island split up into two tribes that compete each other in challenges, with the losing team having to vote someone out if they lose the challenge. A person is voted out after anonymous voting where each person votes for another person to go home, with the person obtaining the most votes going home. After the team phase, there is a merge phase where the members of both teams combine onto one tribe, with anyone now being eligible to be voted out.
In the first Survivor, there were two tribes, the Tagi tribe and the Pagong tribe, coming in to the merge both with 5 people each. Richard Hatch came up with an idea to vote in an alliance with his original Tagi tribe, with whom he had spent the first 18 days of the game living with. An alliance is where multiple people all decide ahead of time to vote for a single person in order to organize a vote to make sure that the alliance stays in the game as long as possible. Before the merge, people had voted based on emotions and whom they had felt was not working hard around camp, such as not making fire, or eating too much food and not sharing for others. However, with an alliance, a person is usually voted out for being a threat to winning the game, as the decision becomes less emotional and more strategic. In this case, the Pagong tribe did not have an idea to come up with an alliance, and each of the five members of the Pagong tribe voted for five different people. The Tagi tribe ended up having four people voting for the same person, Gretchen, who ended up going home in a 4-1-1-1-1-1 vote. This strategy employed by Richard eventually won him the game of Survivor and the million dollar prize.
This strategy can be compared to network effects of voting in a crowd, specifically the direct benefit effect as well as the informational effect. In this case, it was to the Tagi tribe’s benefit to work with each other and all decide on a single person to go home in order to ensure their own safety in the game. If they separated their votes, the Tagi tribe members would not have the votes needed to make sure someone on the opposite team went home. This Survivor example also follows the three conditions of informational crowd following effects. The decision to be made is voting someone else besides yourself out of the game. Even though people technically vote at the same time, they make decisions on who to vote out before hand over time with talking between members of the same alliance encouraged. Each person also has private conversations with other people on the island, with everyone not exactly knowing all the conversations that happen at once. Therefore, since a person does not know exactly who to trust all the time, it is usually beneficial for him or her to stick with an alliance and all vote out the same person that is being perceived as a threat in the game of Survivor, because maybe the other alliance members have secret information, like knowledge that the person has lied a lot, about the “threat” that you do not have. Therefore, being in a group affected the decisions of the individual alliance members within the group, as they voted together as a unit when they might not have separately without the knowledge of the other alliance members.
Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor:_Borneo
http://www.vulture.com/2014/03/survivor-best-strategic-moves.html (#2, Hatching the First Alliance)