Influencers in design teams: a computational framework to study their impact on idea generation

Abstract

It is known that wherever there is human interaction, there is social influence. Here, we refer to more influential individuals as “influencers”, who drive team processes for better or worst. Social influence gives rise to social learning, the propensity of humans to mimic the most influential individuals. As individual learning is affected by the presence of an influencer, so is an individual's idea generation . Examining this phenomenon through a series of human studies would require an enormous amount of time to study both individual and team behaviors that affect design outcomes. Hence, this paper provides an agent-based approach to study the effect of influencers during idea generation. This model is supported by the results of two empirical experiments which validate the assumptions and sustain the logic implemented in the model. The results of the model simulation make it possible to examine the impact of influencers on design outcomes, assessed in the form of exploration of design solution space and quality of the solution. The results show that teams with a few prominent influencers generate solutions with limited diversity. Moreover, during idea generation, the behavior of the teams with uniform distribution of influence is regulated by their team members' self-efficacy.

Idea selection in design teams: a computational framework and insights in the presence of influencers

“…It was also shown that learning during idea generation from positive experiences, negative experiences, and social influence varied for teams with different compositions (Singh et al 2020). The same study also found that teams without well-defined influencers explore more but produce solutions with lower quality (Singh et al 2021). Studies like the one done by Becker, Brackbill & Centol (2017) in the domain of network dynamics of social influence shows that social learning could amplify the influence of some individuals and in cases when the influence of central individuals dominates, the group is likely to increase in error.…”

“…(5) were taken as 0.5. where is the degree of influence from agent j perceived by agent i , which is given below as a function of is the difference in self-efficacy of agent i and agent j , T is the degree of trust agent i has on agent j. is the self-efficacy of an agent j (a more detailed discussion on this formulation is given in Singh et al (2021)). The self-efficacy of the two agents are compared, that is, if SE i > SE j then the = 0.…”

“…(6). This considers the impact of a low self-efficacy agent, and the impact on on a high SE agent when they perceived influence from their peers (as proposed in Singh et al 2021).…”

“…However, in design teams, these influencers have not been studied. Although, from the literature in other domains such as social psychology and group dynamics, self-efficacy that mediates the Big Five personality traits (Stajkovic et al 2018) and trust that impacts individual and team level characteristics (Costa, Fulmer & Anderson 2018), were identified as factors that could contribute to influencing and being influenced behaviour in design teams (see more Singh et al 2021). Studies in the past have shown the impact of social influence on brainstorming and found that individuals tend to mimic their team members (Brown & Paulus 1996).…”

“…Therefore, one of the social factors considered in the article is the influencer effect where the individuals with more social influence (referred to as called influencers as described above) have more capacity to persuade than others (Aries et al 1983). Similar to the expert effect that is in the presence of a ‘ highly confident individual in the group’ (Moussaïd et al 2013), self-efficacy is considered in this study for determining the influencer effect (Singh et al 2021). Moussaïd et al (2013) also showed in their model that confident individuals could change the opinions of the population (majority) around them.…”