喜新厭舊與團隊合作行為:有重啟公共物品實驗的證據(jù)

摘要： 喜新厭舊作為人類天性,也體現(xiàn)在社會交往與合作中。團隊持續(xù)合作產(chǎn)生"厭舊"效應驅使合作衰減,而重新給予合作機會則會推動合作回升,其中"喜新"效應可能發(fā)揮作用。本文從認知神經(jīng)科學視角出發(fā),通過反應時間檢驗喜新厭舊效應的作用,提出了經(jīng)驗記憶和互惠影響喜新效應強度和動態(tài)的假說,并通過時段不確定設置、人造經(jīng)驗設置和休息設置等實驗進行對比檢驗。實驗結果從反應時間角度支持了存在喜新厭舊的假說,也支持了基于經(jīng)驗和互惠的解釋,經(jīng)驗決定了喜新效應驅動的合作回升的總體動態(tài),而互惠決定了合作天性再次被擠出的趨勢,"休息"停頓造成合作回升的假說被否定。研究對團隊合作的任務設置和團隊輪換等具有指導意義。
The favoritism for novelty and the boredom of repetition are natural characters of mankind. People are more sensitive to novelty, but when they keep on interacting, they may feel boredom. This psychology trend will influence the social interaction and teamwork cooperation. Do the feeling of novelty and boredom influence teamwork cooperation, if so, what impacts this effect? Some experimental results show boredom may decrease cooperation, and restart teamwork will make cooperation reverse to a high level, the later results may be the signal of novelty effect. We define novelty effect as the favoritism for novelty and the increase of cooperation when teammates are given new cooperation opportunity. Some studies advice that reciprocity and altruism could be the main mechanism behind the novelty effect. However, since people always have experience and memory about the cooperation history, we could ask whether experience and memory also could stimulate the feeling of novelty and then improve cooperation.In this paper, we designed experiments to look for evidence of the influence of novelty and the factors which impact novelty effects. In the experiments, the teamwork is linear public good provision; subjects need to decide how much endowment should be invest into the public account and hope to get some return from public good. After every phase of 20 periods, there will be a restart and then subject will go on interacting with teammates for another new phase. This task describes the most importance features of teamwork: the motivation of free riding, the boredom which may be generated from repetition and the novelty stimulated by the restart. Generally speaking, we use response time to measure the effect of novelty and boredom. If subjects truly react more quickly when they repeat the tasks again and again, and spent more time to think when they met new cooperation opportunity, then the feeling of novelty and boredom may actually influence teamwork cooperation. There are 4 treatments to test our hypothesis. In the baseline treatment, subjects will experience 2 unexpected restart and get the true information of their teammates' average contribution. In the artificial experience treatment, subjects will experience 2 restart and observe only the 2/3 of the true teammates' average contribution. In this treatment, the subjects' experience has been manuscript. If they cooperated less than the baseline treatment accordingly, we could find experience and memory work in the novelty effect. In the restart-uncertain treatment, the ending of the whole experiment and the periods a phase including after restart are both randomized. The theory suggesting reciprocity will influence novelty effect predicts that the cooperation in the periods after the restart will become less as the phases after restart become uncertain. With the comparison of this treatment and the baseline, we can see whether reciprocity could influence novelty effect alone. We also design a treatment in which there is no unexpected restart, subjects were told previously that they would rest twice after every 20 periods. This treatment is used to test whether cooperation improvement is contributed by rest. The experimental results support our hypothesis. Response time data confirmed the favoritism for novelty and boredom. The response time was significantly shorter when the teamwork repeated more than 10 periods, while it was longer when subject were thinking how to cooperate in the earlier periods after every restart. The experimental result showed the hypothesizes based on experience and reciprocity had been supported, subject' contribution to teamwork copied the observed contribution curves of last 20 periods, and the cooperation was much lower when how many periods a phase would last were uncertain. The experience and memory promoted the dynamic of restart cooperation which was driven by novelty effect, and reciprocity made the trend of cooperation crowd-out. Rest hypothesis had been rejected. In summary, this paper proves the feeling of novelty and boredom influence cooperation, and also finds experience and reciprocity impact novelty effect. This research may guard the practice of the task design or work change in teamwork, and help to improve teamwork performance.