What failure in collective decision-making tells us about metacognition collective failure and metacognition

TY - CHAP

T1 - What failure in collective decision-making tells us about metacognition collective failure and metacognition

AU - Bang, Dan

AU - Mahmoodi, Ali

AU - Olsen, Karsten

AU - Roepstorff, Andreas

AU - Rees, Geraint

AU - Frith, Chris

AU - Bahrami, Bahador

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. All rights reserved.

PY - 2014/12/1

Y1 - 2014/12/1

N2 - Condorcet [2] 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.

AB - Condorcet [2] 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.

KW - Collective decision-making

KW - Communication

KW - Confidence

KW - Cooperative behaviour

KW - Feedback

KW - Metacognition

KW - Signal detection

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84930320672&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-45190-4_9

DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-45190-4_9

M3 - Book chapter

AN - SCOPUS:84930320672

SN - 3642451896

SN - 9783642451898

VL - 9783642451904

SP - 189

EP - 221

BT - The Cognitive Neuroscience of Metacognition

A2 - Fleming, Stephen M.

A2 - Frith, Christopher D.

PB - Springer Berlin, Heidelberg

ER -