online spread of ideas and news, yet we lack models to predict the behavior change produced by this very same campaign. We argue these failures of use and prediction are not caused by a lack of expertise in data analysis, but by an insufficient focus on the underlying incentive structures—the hidden network of interpersonal motivations that provide the engine for collective decision making and action.

A number of large-scale social mobilization experiments have revealed the important role of incentive structures in realistic, adversarial settings. These planetary-scale experiments include the DARPA Network Challenge to locate 10 weather balloons tethered at random locations all over the continental U.S., which was won by our team using a recursive incentive scheme to recruit an estimated two million searchers within 48 hours; the DARPA Shredder Challenge, in which we recruited over 3,500 individuals to collaboratively assemble real shredded documents; and the most recent U.S. State Department’s Tag Challenge, in which we recruited volunteers to locate individuals “at large” in remote cities within 12 hours and won again using the very same incentive scheme. In each challenge, all competing teams had the same type of message (that is, find the balloons, assemble shreds, find the target individuals), and many of them managed to create viral campaigns that reached large populations and created awareness, yet the efficiency of the strategies varied widely and was strongly correlated with the manner in which their incentive design matched the motivations of the participants. Even in the simple task of finding balloons, we saw teams tapping into people’s incentives toward personal profit, charity, reciprocity, or entertainment, with varying degrees of success. Some incentive structures posed by competing teams were compatible with the internal incentive structures of the individuals, and could therefore switch them ‘on’, activating a network cascade of actions, whereas others did not succeed to do so.

We believe incentive networks play
an important middle layer between
higher-order concepts such as ideolo-
gies and culture, and the digital finger-
prints left by social movements in on-
line digital platforms such as Twitter
and Facebook. Ideologies and culture
shape what individuals want to achieve
as they go about their daily life, how
they relate to each other’s well-being,
and how they help each other achieve
those goals. This can be mapped into a
network of incentives where each indi-
vidual payoff depends on others indi-
vidual payoff. Incentives structures are
shaped by more abstract underlying
processes, but can be mapped quanti-
tatively by these large-scale collective
action experiments.
The inability to sustain and trans-
fer bursts of social mobilization in
order to create lasting social change
is rooted in the design of today’s digi-
tal social media. Today’s social media
is designed to maximize information
propagation and virality (through op-
timization of clicks and shares) to the
detriment of engagement and con-
sensus building. For instance, Onnela
and Reed-Tsochas19 demonstrate that
even when external signals are absent,
digital social influence spontaneously
assumes an unstable all-or-nothing
nature. The result is “flash fads,” the
ever-changing inception, competition,
and death of new fads that annihilate
each other, as they compete for peo-
ple’s attention, with no long-lasting re-
sult. 31 Effective social mobilization is a
product of both information diffusion
and action recruitment incentives, yet
the pressures of the social media busi-
ness have focused on diffusion to the
detriment of incentives for recruiting
people to act. Even from the business
perspective, social media is extraordi-
narily ineffective at the goal of recruit-
ment to action, for example, clicking
through ads to purchase. The best
Why isn’t
social media
a more reliable
channel for
constructive
social change?
Calendar
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April 3–6

ISPD’16: International Symposium on Physical Design, Santa Rosa, CA, Sponsored: ACM/SIG, Contact: Fung Yu Young, Email: [e-mail]

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