Guidelines and feedback in information exchange: The impact of behavioral anchors and descriptive norms in a social dilemma

Exchanging information through a shared database is a social dilemma. Each member of a work group saves costs by not contributing any information and by using the database only to retrieve information that was contributed by others. But if all people act according to this strategy, then the database is empty and useless for each group member. This article describes how standards influence people's behavior in this information-exchange dilemma. Based on assumptions about anchoring processes and processes of social comparison, the authors expect guidelines (as anchors) and feedback about others' behavior (as social standards) to influence people's information exchange. The first experiment indicates that arbitrary guidelines serve as behavioral anchors and influence people's contribution behavior - but only if the guidelines are made salient enough. The second experiment shows that bogus feedback about teammates' high or low contribution rates provoke the participants to conform to the behavior of the others.