Debiasing the crowd: selectively exchanging social information improves collective decision making
15 Mar 2020
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Jayles Bertrand
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Kurvers Ralf H. J. M
Collective decision making is ubiquitous across biological systems. However,
biases at the individual level can impair the quality of collective decisions...One prime bias is the human tendency to underestimate quantities. We performed
estimation experiments in human groups, in which we re-wired the structure of
information exchange, favouring the exchange of estimates closest to an
overestimation of the median, expected to approximate the truth. We show that
this re-wiring of social information exchange counteracts the underestimation
bias and boosts collective decisions compared to random exchange. Underlying
this result are a human tendency to herd, to trust large numbers more than
small numbers, and to follow disparate social information less. We introduce a
model that reproduces all the main empirical results, and predicts conditions
for optimising collective decisions. Our results show that leveraging existing
knowledge on biases can boost collective decision making, paving the way for
combating other cognitive biases threatening collective systems.(read more)