How intermittent breaks in interaction improve collective intelligence.

ABSTRACT: People influence each other when they interact to solve problems. Such social influence introduces both benefits (higher average solution quality due to exploitation of existing answers through social learning) and costs (lower maximum solution quality due to a reduction in individual exploration for novel answers) relative to independent problem solving. In contrast to prior work, which has focused on how the presence and network structure of social influence affect performance, here we investigate the effects of time. We show that when social influence is intermittent it provides the benefits of constant social influence without the costs. Human subjects solved the canonical traveling salesperson problem in groups of three, randomized into treatments with constant social influence, inter

SUBMITTER: Bernstein E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6126746 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature