Abstract
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Highlights
Effective decision-making is essential in all areas of human society and, more generally, for all organisms
Given the prior probability p, the cost and benefits associated with the two states of the world, and the state-dependent characteristics of the cue(s) decision-makers base their decisions on, the optimal realised individual accuracies a+ and a– are derived by solving a signal detection problem (Figure 1)
As described in the appendix, for simplicity and tractability our analysis is conducted for the simplest signal detection problem, determining which of two normal distributions a single scalar random variable is drawn from; this could, in the example of a predator detection problem, be the instantaneous volume of a sound heard by a forager
Summary
Effective decision-making is essential in all areas of human society and, more generally, for all organisms. A fundamental question in this context is when a group of decision-makers is superior to individual decision-makers and vice-versa (Galton, 1907; Surowiecki, 2005; Bahrami et al, 2010; Lorenz et al, 2011; Koriat, 2012; Kurvers et al, 2016) Both in human and animal collective decision-making, the Condorcet Jury Theorem is one of the key principles guiding our thinking about this question (List, 2004; Hastie and Kameda, 2005; King and Cowlishaw, 2007; Sumpter et al, 2008; Austen-Smith and Feddersen, 2009; Conradt and List, 2009; Kao and Couzin, 2014a; Marshall et al, 2017).
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