ODA seminar by Lisa Faessler

The ODA Section hosts a research seminar with Postdoc Lisa Faessler from HEC Lausann, Switzerland, who will give a presentation entitled: 
Success-biased social learning: Using successful leaders as examples of how to behave and how not to behave

Abstract
People tend to imitate successful individuals more than those who are not successful, and leaders leverage this tendency when "leading by success." However, recent theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that social learning strategies, including success-biased social learning, are more complex than previously thought. The added complexity and flexibility could challenge current success-based leadership techniques. Focusing on success-biased social learning, we studied how individuals adapt their behaviors based on the actions of successful leaders. Through an incentivized experiment, we examine participants’ decision-making after observing the behavior of a successful leader and two additional cues: the leader’s group affiliation and the affiliation implications. An accompanying gene-culture coevolutionary agent-based simulation integrates cognitive mechanisms to process the same three types of social information, along with private information. Our findings highlight three critical aspects of success-biased social learning. First, strategies are multi-dimensional. Participants and agents adjust their responses based on multiple pieces of social information. Second, while adjustments are symmetric in the simulation, the experiment shows participants perform better in certain conditions than others, indicating cognitive biases. Finally, the simulation and the experiment demonstrate significant heterogeneity and flexibility in the use of social learning strategies. Our results show that followers adjust to success-dependent social information in complex and heterogeneous ways, including using successful leaders as negative examples. More effective success-based leadership strategies would integrate the complexity and flexibility of followers’ cognition.

Everyone is welcome!