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.

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 Seasonality in communication and collective decision-making in ants

2014 ◽  
Vol 281 (1780) ◽  
pp. 20133108 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Stroeymeyt ◽  
C. Jordan ◽  
G. Mayer ◽  
S. Hovsepian ◽  
M. Giurfa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Seasonal Changes ◽  
Collective Intelligence ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Ant Colonies ◽  
Temnothorax Albipennis ◽  
Eusocial Insects ◽  
Optimal Decisions ◽  
Independent Evaluation

The ability of animals to adjust their behaviour according to seasonal changes in their ecology is crucial for their fitness. Eusocial insects display strong collective behavioural seasonality, yet the mechanisms underlying such changes are poorly understood. We show that nest preference by emigrating Temnothorax albipennis ant colonies is influenced by a season-specific modulatory pheromone that may help tune decision-making according to seasonal constraints. The modulatory pheromone triggers aversion towards low-quality nests and enhances colony cohesion in summer and autumn, but not after overwintering—in agreement with reports that field colonies split in spring and reunite in summer. Interestingly, we show that the pheromone acts by downgrading the perceived value of marked nests by informed and naive individuals. This contrasts with theories of collective intelligence, stating that accurate collective decision-making requires independent evaluation of options by individuals. The violation of independence highlighted here was accordingly shown to increase error rate during emigrations. However, this is counterbalanced by enhanced cohesion and the transmission of valuable information through the colony. Our results support recent claims that optimal decisions are not necessarily those that maximize accuracy. Other criteria—such as cohesion or reward rate—may be more relevant in animal decision-making.

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 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.

scholarly journals Division of labour promotes the spread of information in colony emigrations by the ant Temnothorax rugatulus

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriele Valentini ◽  
Naoki Masuda ◽  
Zachary Shaffer ◽  
Jake R. Hanson ◽  
Takao Sasaki ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Group Living ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Detailed Characterization ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Share Information ◽  
Colony Level

AbstractThe fitness of group-living animals often depends on how well members share information needed for collective decision-making. Theoretical studies have shown that collective choices can emerge in a homogeneous group of individuals following identical rules, but real animals show much evidence for heterogeneity in the degree and nature of their contribution to group decisions. In social insects, for example, the transmission and processing of information is influenced by a well-organized division of labour. Studies that accurately quantify how this behavioural heterogeneity affects the spread of information among group members are still lacking. In this paper, we look at nest choices during colony emigrations of the ant Temnothorax rugatulus and quantify the degree of behavioural heterogeneity of workers. Using methods from both machine learning and network analysis, we identify and characterize four behavioural castes of workers – primary, secondary, passive, and wandering – covering distinct roles in the spread of information during each emigration. This detailed characterization of the contribution of each worker can improve models of collective decision-making in this species and promises a deeper understanding of behavioural variation at the colony level.

scholarly journals Division of labour promotes the spread of information in colony emigrations by the ant Temnothorax rugatulus

2020 ◽  
Vol 287 (1924) ◽  
pp. 20192950 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriele Valentini ◽  
Naoki Masuda ◽  
Zachary Shaffer ◽  
Jake R. Hanson ◽  
Takao Sasaki ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Group Living ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Clustering Methods ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Share Information ◽  
Colony Level

The fitness of group-living animals often depends on how well members share information needed for collective decision-making. Theoretical studies have shown that collective choices can emerge in a homogeneous group of individuals following identical rules, but real animals show much evidence for heterogeneity in the degree and nature of their contribution to group decisions. In social insects, for example, the transmission and processing of information is influenced by a well-organized division of labour. Studies that accurately quantify how this behavioural heterogeneity affects the spread of information among group members are still lacking. In this paper, we look at nest choices during colony emigrations of the ant Temnothorax rugatulus and quantify the degree of behavioural heterogeneity of workers. Using clustering methods and network analysis, we identify and characterize four behavioural castes of workers—primary, secondary, passive and wandering—covering distinct roles in the spread of information during an emigration. This detailed characterization of the contribution of each worker can improve models of collective decision-making in this species and promises a deeper understanding of behavioural variation at the colony level.

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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