Kit Yates

It was a voting game.

They had two possibilities of either voting for option A or option B. I vote A.

Yeah, well, you're good then, you're fine.

Well, you might lose out there, right?

So there's a reward system going on.

But also people are allowed to abstain.

So if you wanted to take part in the vote each round, we did sequential rounds of voting.

If you want to take part in the vote, it would cost you 100 points.

But if you voted with the consensus, with what most other people in the group were doing, you got 150 points back.

So you could gain 50 points overall.

Or, you could be neutral, and that wouldn't cost you anything.

So what we said to the people was, if you vote with the consensus the most times, you get a monetary reward.

So there was an incentive for voting with the consensus.

And after each round, we would show people a sample of the votes of people in the previous round.

So they knew sort of what was going on, what might inform them being able to vote with the consensus.

And what we found was that if we allowed them to abstain, then they would switch consensus more quickly.

They would find a consensus, a decision more quickly.

But if we didn't allow them to abstain, we removed that option.

But it took them much longer to form consensus and to change consensus.

Yeah, with the locusts, it is like that.