LEADERSHIP WITHOUT LEADERS:
SOCIAL INFLUENCE AND ONLINE
COLLECTIVE ACTION
Helen Margetts
www.oii.ox.ac.uk
www.governmentontheweb.org
How do information environments on the
internet affect collective behaviour?
 Political information: what people find (search behaviour –
online presence of government and NGOs)
 Social influence
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‘Social information’
‘Visibility’ (versus anonymity)
Feedback, co-production, co-creation
Peer-to-peer pressure, through social networks
 Differential demographics, personalities, access, skills
 Less need for highly resourced charismatic leaders –
rather ‘starters’ – and ‘followers’
Which collective actions succeed in
reaching ‘critical mass’ ?
Experiment 1:
Effect of social information on political
participation
Quasi-field Experiment
668 subjects from OxLab
Participating remotely via custom-built interface
Paid £6-8
6 petitions on global issues
Control: no social information
Randomized treatments with ‘high’, ‘low’, ‘middle’
nos. of signatories
Subjects Signing Petitions (by number of other signatories)
Treatment: number of other signatories
Low
Medium
High
P1: Human Rights in Tibet
P2: Cluster Bomb
P3: End Whaling
P4: Protect Darfur
P5: Climate Change
P6: Fair Trade
Experiment 1: Social Information and
Political Participation on the Internet: an
Experiment
Helen Margetts*, Peter John**
Stephane Reissfelder*, Scott Hale*
*Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
**Department of Political Science, UCL
Margetts, H. John, P., Escher, T. and Reissfelder, S.
(2011), European Political Science Review
http://journals.cambridge.org/__repo_A83VUeRy
Experiment 2
Social Influence and Collective action:
Heterogeneous
Personality Effects
Helen Margetts*, Peter John**
Stephane Reissfelder*
Scott Hale*,
*Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
**School of Social Sciences,
University of Manchester
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1892805
Experimental Design
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Laboratory-based experiment
Subjects divided into small groups (typically 10)
Public goods game
• Subjects get 10 tokens for every round
• Presented with local public goods scenarios (eg. clearing snow)
• Extra pay out when 60% reached - highest payout if free-ride
• Pay out on one round only - lottery
Control - no information
2 treatments – social information and visibility
Subjects randomly assigned across groups (never know which group in)
and across treatments and control
Post-experiment questionnaire – demographics, agreement with and
importance of issue, personality questionnaires (eg. locus of control,
individualistic/co-operative, ‘Big 5’ personality traits – extraversion,
openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability)
Experimental interface: Social information treatment
Distribution of individual contributions
by treatment conditions
Effect of social information and visibility treatments
on the likelihood of rounds being funded
The information environment matters
 Visibility has overall treatment effect – people give more with visibility
 Under social information there is no overall effect at the individual
level
 But, rounds more likely to be funded under both social information
and visibility treatments (social information is more efficient)
 Personality is the mediating variable…
 Pro-socials (co-operatives) give more, pro-selfs (individualists)
give less
 Personality types differentially affected by treatment –
• Pro-selfs give more under social information and visibility
treatments than under control – pro-socials give less
Behaviour of Pro-selfs and Pro-socials under Visibility and
Social Information Treatments
Who starts collective action?
 People have heterogeneous propensity to ‘start’
mobilizations – different (consistent) ‘thresholds’ for joining
(Schelling, Granovetter)
 Those most likely to ‘start’ (low thresholds) are
 Extraverts
 People with high internal locus of control
 Agreeable people are significantly more likely to go late
(high thresholds)
 Rounds with low numbers of extraverts unlikely to be funded
Leaders and Followers:
Rank and standard deviation of rank across games
for individual subjects
Further Reference:
Collective Action Experiments in OxLab
Experiment 1: Social information and Political Participation on the Internet
Margetts, H. John, P., Escher, T. and Reissfelder, S. (2011) 'Social Information and
Political Participation on the Internet: an Experiment', European Political Science
Review
http://journals.cambridge.org/__repo_A83VUeRy
Experiment 2: Applying Social Influence to Collective Action: Heterogeneous
Personality Effects
Margetts, H. John, P. Reissfelder, S. and Hale, S. ‘Social Influence and Collective
Action: An Experiment Investigating the Effects of Visibility and Social Information
Moderated by Personality' (April 18 2012). Available for comment at SSRN:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1892805