In this post I summarize a few papers with extremely surprising and important results about social learning. Suppose you have some news that you need as many people to learn about as possible. A topical example is disseminating Covid-19 prevention measures. What’s the best way to spread the message?
It seems obvious that if the goal is to get as many people to learn as possible, you should just broadcast the news as widely as you can, making sure everyone gets the memo. Shockingly, this is not always true: spreading information widely can result in less learning than sharing it with only a few people. Two recent papers confirm this both theoretically and experimentally.
How could spreading information more widely result in less learning? The proposed culprit is the desire to not look dumb. When everyone gets the same information, and everyone knows that everyone gets the same information, asking for help concedes that you couldn’t figure things out on your own when other people could. That means you might choose to stay silent instead of asking your neighbors for help, hindering your learning.
Chandrasekhar, Golub, and Yang (2019), which I’ll refer to as CGY, study two channels through which aversion to looking dumb hinders learning: signaling and shame.1 When you ask someone for help, that person might infer that you are not smart. This penalty to your reputation constitutes the signaling channel. Admitting your own inability to learn might also be painful in and of itself irrespective of the reputational consequences. The unpleasantness of admitting and confronting your weaknesses in front of another person is the shame channel.
CGY run an experiment across villages in Karnataka, India to test how these two forces affect learning. Participants are split into seekers and advisors. Seekers participate in a game where they guess which of two boxes contains a cell phone. If they guess correctly they get to keep the phone. The key is that seekers get clues about which box has the phone. In the first arm of the experiment, the number of clues a seeker gets is either completely random or based on their score on a cognitive test, with a higher score resulting in more clues. Seekers get paired with an advisor from their village whom they can ask for help in collecting potentially more clues, but the caveat is that by seeking help they reveal to their advisor information about the number of clues they got initially. This should make no difference in seeking decisions when the number of clues is random, but when clues are based on the cognitive test the seeker may fear stigma from drawing attention to their low score. In this arm of the experiment, seekers with low scores are 55% less likely to ask their advisor for help when the number of clues is based on test scores instead of randomly assigned. This demonstrates that social stigma can have huge effects on decisions to ask for help.
This arm on its own does not separate stigma into signaling and shame. The second arm addresses this by varying whether test scores get automatically revealed to advisors. If the advisor already knows the seeker’s score, the seeker does not signal anything about their ability by asking for help. That means revealing the score to the advisor shuts down the signaling channel and isolates the shame channel. CGY find that both shame and signaling have a substantial effect on seeking decisions, but, imposing some assumptions, they find the signaling effect is eight times bigger on average than the shame effect.
However, the magnitudes depend a lot on social proximity between the advisor and the seeker. When the advisor and seeker are socially proximate (e.g., friends or of the same caste), shame can have a large effect and signaling is negligible, but when the advisor and seeker are socially distant, signaling dominates shame. This suggests there is less scope for reputational damage among close acquaintances who know each other well already. On the other hand, shame seems to matter more among close acquaintances since the emotional stakes are higher around people we interact with frequently.
Banerjee, Breza, Chandrasekhar, and Golub (2019), which I’ll refer to as BBCG, study the effects of stigma on learning in a high stakes setting—the 2016 Indian demonetization. The 2016 demonetization was markedly chaotic. In the seven weeks after the announcement that all Rs. 500 and 1000 notes would be demonetized, there were over 50 rule changes, resulting in widespread confusion and misinformation. BBCG ran an experiment across villages in India to test different methods for diffusing accurate information. They provided pamphlets with official details about demonetization to village members but varied how the information was delivered. There were two levels of randomization: the number of people given information, and whether the dissemination was common knowledge. In half the villages, every person received a pamphlet with information about demonetization, while in the other half only five villagers were given pamphlets. BBCG then randomized whether people knew who in the village had received a pamphlet. In the “Common Knowledge” treatment, everyone was notified which villagers had received a pamphlet, while in the “No Common Knowledge” treatment, people were not told who received a pamphlet.
As I mentioned, the intuitive expectation is that sharing information with everyone in the village should result in more learning than sharing it with only five people. Because of stigma, this turns out not to be true. When the dissemination strategy is common knowledge, villages where only five people receive information about demonetization experience a lot more learning than villages where everyone receives information. When everyone receives a pamphlet and this is common knowledge, they avoid discussing details with each other out of fear of looking dumb or lazy, and as a consequence know less about demonetization in ways that demonstrably result in poor decisions. In contrast, when only five individuals receive information, people do not feel as much inhibition about asking for help, resulting in more learning and better decisions. Maybe even more surprisingly, the treatment where everyone is given a pamphlet but there is no common knowledge results in the best outcomes. When everyone receives a pamphlet but no one knows that everyone else got one too, people can still ask their neighbors for help without fear of stigma.
These two papers show that stigma is remarkably important in hindering how people learn, and they compel researchers to think about how to foster social environments that mitigate signaling and shame.
- Goffman considered the distinction between signaling and shame in his 1963 work on stigma.