Abstract
There are various ways to reach a group decision on a factual yes–no question. One way is to vote and decide what the majority votes for. This procedure receives some epistemological support from the Condorcet Jury Theorem. Alternatively, the group members may prefer to deliberate and will eventually reach a decision that everybody endorses—a consensus. While the latter procedure has the advantage that it makes everybody happy (as everybody endorses the consensus), it has the disadvantage that it is difficult to implement, especially for larger groups. Besides, the resulting consensus may be far away from the truth. And so we ask: Is deliberation truth-conducive in the sense that majority voting is? To address this question, we construct a highly idealized model of a particular deliberation process, inspired by the movie Twelve Angry Men, and show that the answer is ‘yes’. Deliberation procedures can be truth-conducive just as the voting procedure is. We then explore, again on the basis of our model and using agent-based simulations, under which conditions it is better epistemically to deliberate than to vote. Our analysis shows that there are contexts in which deliberation is epistemically preferable and we will provide reasons for why this is so.
Highlights
Consider a group that has to decide on a a factual yes–no question
For groups with very high second order reliabilities the estimated likelihood ratios correspond to the correct values and as one can notice from Theorem 1, for reliable homogeneous groups, the deliberation process will result in a group consensus on the correct answer if and only if the majority of group members vote correct initially
The goal of this paper was (i) to present a new Bayesian model for non-strategic rational deliberation, (ii) to study the emergence of consensus and its truth tracking properties, and (iii) to compare this deliberation process with majority voting in terms of their truth-tracking properties
Summary
Consider a group that has to decide on a a factual yes–no question. A jury in court, for example, has to decide whether the defendant is guilty or not. There is, no formal analysis which (i) shows that deliberation procedures are truth-conducive (in a similar way as majority voting is truth conducive according to the Condorcet Jury Theorem) and that (ii) explores which procedure does better (under certain conditions) epistemically. We will address these question in this article by constructing and analyzing a simple and highly idealized model of deliberation.
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