Willing but not Eager
Why do some people hide information, others give out information willingly, and others spew their information to anyone who will listen (or read)? I recently discovered an interesting experiment which attempts to shed light on the latter two types of people. The experiment attempts to understand if there are fundamental differences between people which could explain the differences between people eager to share information versus those simply willing.
From the study:
- Willingness is defined as: the extent to which an individual is prepared to grant other group members
access to their individual intellectual capital. - Eagerness, on the other hand, is defined as: the extent to which an individual has a strong internal drive to communicate their individual intellectual capital to other group members.
I was particularly interested in this study because it was attempting to explain the difference in these two attitudes as a result of ideocentric vs. allocentric orientation. I was surprised, however, to see that the authors of the study began with a hypothesis which is completely opposite of what I would have postulated. They postulated that people with allocentric (collectivist, ?service to others?) orientation would be more ?willing?, while people with ideocentric (selfish) orientation would be more ?eager?.
Only a most naive understanding of human nature would lead to such a hypothesis, and thankfully the experiment was conducted with enough discipline to prove their hypothesis wrong. On the other hand, the experiment did not exactly prove my hypothesis correct, either.
In my opinion, the failure of the experiment to show a strong correlation between allocentrism and eagerness to share information (my hypothesis) is caused by the fact that ideocentric/allocentric distinction is not useful for explaining motivations.Using the allocentric/ideocentric distinction to explain differences in norms and expectations is fairly common in social science and is good practice, IMO. However, ?eager? and ?willing? are both fundamentally a question of motivation, rather than a question of norms and expectations. And when it comes to motivations, the distinctions are much less useful. For example, many people in collectivist societies have a strong allocentric bias in behavior and norms, but are not necessarily motivated by allocentric beliefs — fear of being put in a prison camp is a strong ideocentric motive for adopting allocentric behaviors. To show a correlation between allocentrism and ?eagerness?, I believe you would have to select for people who are actually behaving out of an allocentric motivation rather than simply hewing to allocentric norms.