scholarly journals Wisdom of crowds benefits perceptual decision making across difficulty levels

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiasha Saha Roy ◽  
Satyaki Mazumder ◽  
Koel Das
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Error Rates ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Difficulty Level ◽  
Classification Error ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Group Aggregation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Random Target

AbstractDecades of research on collective decision making has claimed that aggregated judgment of multiple individuals is more accurate than expert individual judgement. A longstanding problem in this regard has been to determine how decisions of individuals can be combined to form intelligent group decisions. Our study consisted of a random target detection task in natural scenes, where human subjects (18 subjects, 7 female) detected the presence or absence of a random target as indicated by the cue word displayed prior to stimulus display. Concurrently the neural activities (EEG signals) were recorded. A separate behavioural experiment was performed by different subjects (20 subjects, 11 female) on the same set of images to categorize the tasks according to their difficulty levels. We demonstrate that the weighted average of individual decision confidence/neural decision variables produces significantly better performance than the frequently used majority pooling algorithm. Further, the classification error rates from individual judgement were found to increase with increasing task difficulty. This error could be significantly reduced upon combining the individual decisions using group aggregation rules. Using statistical tests, we show that combining all available participants is unnecessary to achieve minimum classification error rate. We also try to explore if group aggregation benefits depend on the correlation between the individual judgements of the group and our results seem to suggest that reduced inter-subject correlation can improve collective decision making for a fixed difficulty level.

Aggregation of Information by Binary Voting Rules

2019 ◽  
pp. 126-144
Author(s):  
Shmuel Nitzan ◽  
Jacob Paroush
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Aggregation Rule ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Relevant Variables ◽  
Aggregation Of Information ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

A group of individuals faces the choice of an alternative out of a set of alternatives. Each member of the group holds an opinion regarding the most suitable (best) alternative for which he or she votes. In this setting, the individual votes are based on their decisional competencies, which hinge on the information to which they are exposed and on their ability to make use of that information. The main question is how to translate the group members’ voting profile to a single collective choice. This chapter studies different aspects of this question in the context of binary voting where the group faces only two alternatives. The selection of an appropriate aggregation rule is a central issue in the fields of social choice, public choice, voting theory, and collective decision making. Since the votes are based on the individual competencies, the applied aggregation rule should take into account not only the voting profile but also the competency profile. In fact, it should also take into consideration any other relevant environmental information such as the asymmetry between the feasible alternatives, the dependence between individual votes, decision-making costs, and the available past record of the voters’ decisions. The chapter focuses on the clarification of the relationship between the performance of binary aggregation rules and the relevant variables and parameters. This has direct normative implications regarding the desirable mode of collective decision making and, in particular, regarding the desirable aggregation rule and the size and the composition of the decision-making body.

scholarly journals Equality bias impairs collective decision-making across cultures

2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (12) ◽  
pp. 3835-3840 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Mahmoodi ◽  
Dan Bang ◽  
Karsten Olsen ◽  
Yuanyuan Aimee Zhao ◽  
Zhenhao Shi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Monetary Incentives ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Optimal Decisions ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Equal Weighting ◽  
Explicit Feedback

We tend to think that everyone deserves an equal say in a debate. This seemingly innocuous assumption can be damaging when we make decisions together as part of a group. To make optimal decisions, group members should weight their differing opinions according to how competent they are relative to one another; whenever they differ in competence, an equal weighting is suboptimal. Here, we asked how people deal with individual differences in competence in the context of a collective perceptual decision-making task. We developed a metric for estimating how participants weight their partner’s opinion relative to their own and compared this weighting to an optimal benchmark. Replicated across three countries (Denmark, Iran, and China), we show that participants assigned nearly equal weights to each other’s opinions regardless of true differences in their competence—even when informed by explicit feedback about their competence gap or under monetary incentives to maximize collective accuracy. This equality bias, whereby people behave as if they are as good or as bad as their partner, is particularly costly for a group when a competence gap separates its members.

scholarly journals What failure in collective decision-making tells us about metacognition

2012 ◽  
Vol 367 (1594) ◽  
pp. 1350-1365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bahador Bahrami ◽  
Karsten Olsen ◽  
Dan Bang ◽  
Andreas Roepstorff ◽  
Geraint Rees ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Information Integration ◽  
Majority Vote ◽  
Sensory Modality ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Integration Problem

Condorcet (1785) proposed that a majority vote drawn from individual, independent and fallible (but not totally uninformed) opinions provides near-perfect accuracy if the number of voters is adequately large. Research in social psychology has since then repeatedly demonstrated that collectives can and do fail more often than expected by Condorcet. Since human collective decisions often follow from exchange of opinions, these failures provide an exquisite opportunity to understand human communication of metacognitive confidence . This question can be addressed by recasting collective decision-making as an information-integration problem similar to multisensory (cross-modal) perception. Previous research in systems neuroscience shows that one brain can integrate information from multiple senses nearly optimally. Inverting the question, we ask: under what conditions can two brains integrate information about one sensory modality optimally? We review recent work that has taken this approach and report discoveries about the quantitative limits of collective perceptual decision-making, and the role of the mode of communication and feedback in collective decision-making. We propose that shared metacognitive confidence conveys the strength of an individual's opinion and its reliability inseparably. We further suggest that a functional role of shared metacognition is to provide substitute signals in situations where outcome is necessary for learning but unavailable or impossible to establish.

scholarly journals Discrete collective estimation in swarm robotics with distributed Bayesian belief sharing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qihao Shan ◽  
Sanaz Mostaghim
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Communication Complexity ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Estimation Problem ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Fill Ratio ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Decision Speed

AbstractMulti-option collective decision-making is a challenging task in the context of swarm intelligence. In this paper, we extend the problem of collective perception from simple binary decision-making of choosing the color in majority to estimating the most likely fill ratio from a series of discrete fill ratio hypotheses. We have applied direct comparison (DC) and direct modulation of voter-based decisions (DMVD) to this scenario to observe their performances in a discrete collective estimation problem. We have also compared their performances against an Individual Exploration baseline. Additionally, we propose a novel collective decision-making strategy called distributed Bayesian belief sharing (DBBS) and apply it to the above discrete collective estimation problem. In the experiments, we explore the performances of considered collective decision-making algorithms in various parameter settings to determine the trade-off among accuracy, speed, message transfer and reliability in the decision-making process. Our results show that both DC and DMVD outperform the Individual Exploration baseline, but both algorithms exhibit different trade-offs with respect to accuracy and decision speed. On the other hand, DBBS exceeds the performances of all other considered algorithms in all four metrics, at the cost of higher communication complexity.

scholarly journals Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the Separation of Powers in Federal Polity and “Wills of Nation”

2021 ◽  
Vol V (4) ◽  
pp. 201-226
Author(s):  
Anton Shablinsky
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Popular Participation ◽  
The People ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Democracy Theory

The problem of this article is built around the tension between the concept of organ sovereignty and democracy theory. First of all, this vision of sovereignty fails to describe the diverse forms of popular participation in collective decision-making. It speaks very sparingly of the people as a political actor. Moreover, the concept of organ sovereignty does not provide the theoretical resources to describe the intermediary bodies in the space between the state and the individual. The tradition of liberal democracy emphasises the importance of such bodies for maintaining popular control over state. Also, the idea of organ sovereignty, by reducing all power to a single legislature, ignores the demand for self-government coming from communities located within the same state and yet united by a certain collective identity. Today, democracy theorists are turning to the concepts of federalism in order to overcome the above-mentioned limitations set by the concept of organ sovereignty. So far, however, the concepts of federalism have not been very convincing in describing the various forms of popular participation in collective decision-making. Above all, they have failed to consistently justify the existence of multiple decision-making centres within a single polity. The article argues that the model of the federal polity proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his later work “Considerations on the mode of government in Poland” explains how within one polity multiple centres of collective decision-making can coexist. The model also provides an understanding of how citizen participation in multiple decision-making centres can be organised.

Islands of Stability: Engaging Emergence from Cellular Automata to the Occupy Movement

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pickering
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cellular Automata ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

"Instead of considering »being with« in terms of non-problematic, machine-like places, where reliable entities assemble in stable relationships, STS conjures up a world where the achievement of chancy stabilisations and synchronisations is local.We have to analyse how and where a certain regularity and predictability in the intersection of scientists and their instruments, say, or of human individuals and groups, is produced.The paper reviews models of emergence drawn from the history of cybernetics—the canonical »black box,« homeostats, and cellular automata—to enrich our imagination of the stabilisation process, and discusses the concept of »variety« as a way of clarifying its difficulty, with the antiuniversities of the 1960s and the Occupy movement as examples. Failures of »being with« are expectable. In conclusion, the paper reviews approaches to collective decision-making that reduce variety without imposing a neoliberal hierarchy. "

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