Wise or mad crowds? The cognitive mechanisms underlying information cascades.

ABSTRACT: Whether getting vaccinated, buying stocks, or crossing streets, people rarely make decisions alone. Rather, multiple people decide sequentially, setting the stage for information cascades whereby early-deciding individuals can influence others' choices. To understand how information cascades through social systems, it is essential to capture the dynamics of the decision-making process. We introduce the social drift-diffusion model to capture these dynamics. We tested our model using a sequential choice task. The model was able to recover the dynamics of the social decision-making process, accurately capturing how individuals integrate personal and social information dynamically over time and when their decisions were timed. Our results show the importance of the interrelationships between

SUBMITTER: Tump AN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7439644 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature