The strength of weak leaders: an experiment on social influence and social learning in teams

Abstract

We investigate how the selection process of a leader affects team performance with respect to social learning. We use a lab experiment in which an incentivized guessing task is repeated in a star network with the leader at the center. Leader selection is either based on competence, on self-confidence, or made at random. Teams with random leaders do not underperform compared to competent leaders, and they even outperform teams whose leader is selected based on self-confidence. The reason is that random leaders are better able to use the knowledge within the team. We can show that it is the declaration of the selection procedure which makes non-random leaders overly influential. We set up a horse race between several rational and naïve models of social learning to investigate the microlevel mechanisms. We find that overconfidence and conservatism contribute to the fact that overly influential leaders mislead their team.

Social Influence Undermines the Wisdom of the Crowd in Sequential Decision Making

“…The wisdom of the crowd effect-the phenomenon that the majority of a group of voters is more likely to be correct than a single individual (Condorcet 1785)-can explain why social information is often valuable input for individual decision makers. Indeed, research suggests individuals could further improve individual performance if they revised their judgments more severely than they typically do when presented with social information (Mannes et al 2012, Büchel et al 2020.…”

“…On the one hand, early expert votes reduce chances of early mistakes, thus tempering the wisdom-undermining effect of social information. On the other hand, early expert votes may set a strong but flawed anchor as experts' opinions tend to be correlated because of similar backgrounds and shared information sources Budescu 2009, Sj öberg 2009), and their expertise and status has been shown to raise the social influence effects on later nonexpert voters (See et al 2011;Henrich 2015, chapter 8;Büchel et al 2020).…”