Abstract
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.
Highlights
Mackay’s decision to doubt and re-examine the popular belief that ‘two heads are better than one’ has since guided numerous disciplines interested in human collective decision-making from political sciences to economics and social psychology
Using collective decision-making in the perceptual domain as a framework, we describe and compare two models of how we communicate and integrate our individual perceptions and their reliability [9,10]
The models make very different assumptions about the exact content of the communicated confidence and the computational strategy by which observers combine them to arrive at a collective decision
Summary
In The extraordinary and popular delusions and madness of crowds, Charles Mackay [1] chronicled a colourful and prolific history of humankind’s collective follies. Mackay’s decision to doubt and re-examine the popular belief that ‘two heads are better than one’ has since guided numerous disciplines interested in human collective decision-making from political sciences to economics and social psychology. Galton collected the approximately 800 submitted tickets and demonstrated in a paper [3] that, the simple average of the estimates of the entire crowd was even more accurate than the winner. A large body of work in political sciences and social psychology has examined collective decision-making and, numerous examples of collective failure have been discovered [4]. Using collective decision-making in the perceptual domain as a framework, we describe and compare two models of how we communicate and integrate our individual perceptions and their reliability [9,10]. The models make very different assumptions about the exact content of the communicated confidence and the computational strategy by which observers combine them to arrive at a collective decision.
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