Attention and Social Learning

2026-06-30

AI Summary

This study investigates how individuals perceive the accuracy of others whose information acquisition is shaped by attentional incentives, and how such perceptions inform their own social learning strategies. Combining incentivized behavioral experiments—featuring a binary-state attention task embedded within a social learning paradigm—the research reveals that even when incentive disparities are fully transparent, most participants fail to recognize that peers under higher incentives provide more accurate information. Consequently, participants do not adjust their own attentional effort when interacting with low-incentive peers. These findings challenge core assumptions of prevailing models of flexible information acquisition, demonstrating a systematic neglect of others’ incentive structures in social learning. The results thus uncover a novel mechanism underlying inefficiencies in collective information processing.

Abstract

In an incentivized laboratory experiment, we study how people account for and respond to others' incentives for paying attention. Participants learn a binary state from an attention task under high or low accuracy incentives. We ask subjects to predict their peers' accuracy based on the peers' incentives and to aggregate answers from multiple peers with different incentives. Most subjects fail to consistently understand that peers with stronger incentives are more accurate, and these subjects also perform worse in individual attention tasks. Subjects also participate in a social-learning task where they first learn the binary state from an attention task, then observe a peer's guess about the state in the same task, and finally make a guess themselves. We find behavior in these tasks is inconsistent with leading models of flexible costly information acquisition. In particular, subjects fail to pay more attention when paired with lower incentive peers. Overall, we find that many decision-makers do not respond to others' incentives for accuracy even when those incentives are transparent.

Problem

• attention
• social learning
• incentives
• information accuracy
• decision-making

Innovation

• attention
• social learning
• incentives
• information acquisition
• experimental economics