Article published in:
Interaction Studies
Vol. 17:3 (2016) ► pp. 371–389

Does successful small-scale coordination help or hinder coordination at larger scales?

| Dartmouth College, USA | Indiana University, USA
| Indiana University, USA

An individual can interact with the same set of people over many different scales simultaneously. Four people might interact as a group of four and, at the same time, in pairs and triads. What is the relationship between different parallel interaction scales, and how might those scales themselves interact?

We devised a four-player experimental game, the Modular Stag Hunt, in which participants chose not just whether to coordinate, but with whom, and at what scale. Our results reveal coordination behavior with such a strong preference for dyads that undermining pairwise coordination actually improves group-scale outcomes. We present these findings as experimental evidence for competition, as opposed to complementarity, between different possible scales of multi-player coordination. This result undermines a basic premise of approaches, like those of network science, that fail to model the interacting effects of dyadic, triadic, and group-scale structures on group outcomes.

Keywords: group structure, coordination, n-player games, networked games, group formation, multi-scale structure
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Generalizing the study of coordination across scales
  • Methods
    • The Modular Stag Hunt
    • Experimental design
    • Subjects and procedure
    • Measures
      • Dependent variable
      • Supporting dependent variables
  • Results
    • Descriptives
    • Main test
    • Supporting analyses
  • Discussion
    • Pairwise coordination prevents coordination at higher scales
    • Alternative explanations
    • History dependence
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 March 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.17.3.03fre
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