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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 13, 2026

Social Threat-Safety Test Uncovers Psychosocial Stress-Related Phenotypes

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Published on: December 15, 2023

Quantifying the effects of social influence.

Pavlin Mavrodiev¹, Claudio J Tessone, Frank Schweitzer

¹Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zurich, Weinbergstrasse 58, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland.

Scientific Reports

|March 2, 2013

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Humans adjust their guesses linearly with the average of others' answers, demonstrating a simple, consistent response to indirect social influence in decision-making, regardless of question difficulty.

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Area of Science:

Social Psychology
Behavioral Economics
Decision Science

Background:

Human decision-making is influenced by social factors.
Indirect social influence, where individuals are affected by aggregated group behavior, is common but not well-quantified.
Previous research has observed responses to aggregated information, but lacked controlled, quantitative analysis.

Purpose of the Study:

To quantitatively investigate how humans respond to indirect social influence in a controlled experimental setting.
To identify and analyze the regularity in individual decision adjustments based on aggregated social information.
To explore the impact of information aggregation levels on collective decision-making.

Main Methods:

An experiment was conducted where subjects guessed answers to factual questions.
Participants received aggregated information about the guesses of other subjects.
Individual guess adjustments were analyzed in relation to the mean of all guesses.

Main Results:

Individual guess adjustments showed a linear dependence on the distance to the mean of all guesses.
This linear regularity was consistent across questions with vastly different correct answer scales.
Individual diversity did not appear to affect the response to indirect social influence.

Conclusions:

Human response to indirect social influence in decision-making exhibits a simple, linear regularity.
The level of information aggregation significantly alters the nature of social influence.
Findings provide empirical support for models of collective decision-making under social influence.