This study made me look a bit differently at group work, while it’s aiming at a much bigger scope. Quite often you can have groups in your classroom or team, where it seems that one or two dominant students decide everything. This new paper begs to differ by describing an alternative model on how decisions are made. In the paper, the authors develop a simple yet general mathematical framework to study the complex interaction of cognitive and social factors that happens when a decision is being made. The model tries to predict a critical threshold for the proportion of social learners, above which an option may prevail regardless of its merit.

From the press release:

From small committees to national elections, group decision-making can be complicated — and it may not always settle on the best choice. That’s partly because some members of the group do research on their own, and others take their cues from the people around them.

That distinction is readily observed around election time. “Many voters couldn’t tell you the policy platforms for the candidates they’re voting for,” says applied mathematician Vicky Chuqiao Yang at the Santa Fe Institute. “Many individuals are uninformed, and they’re most likely to rely on information they get from others.”

Social scientists have long sought ways to study the phenomenon of group decision-making, but that’s a tricky undertaking. Researchers in a range of disciplines have tried to tackle the problem, with parallel efforts often leading to conflicting conclusions. Most existing models examine the effect of a single variable, which means they don’t capture the whole picture.

“The outcome of collective decision making is the result of complex interactions of many variables,” says Yang, “and those interactions are rarely taken into account” in previous work.

To overcome that challenge, Yang recently led the development of a mathematical framework that captures the influence of multiple interactions among members of a group. “You can plug in multiple effects and see their behavior and how they manifest in the group at the same time,” she explains.

Those effects include the influence of social learners. The model predicted, for example, that decision-making groups have a critical threshold of people who get their information from others. Below that threshold, the group chooses the high-quality outcome. Above it, the group can end up choosing the better or worse option.

The model also predicted a significant role for “committed minorities,” or people who refuse to change their minds, no matter the evidence. These committed minorities can be bolstered, Yang says, by social learners, though every group is different.

The mathematical model is both simple and general, and can accurately reflect the multitude of moving parts within a system. Yang’s collaborators include psychologist and SFI Professor Mirta Galesic, economist Ani Harutyunyan at the Sunwater Institute, and Harvey McGuinness, an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University and former student researcher at SFI. (The whole project began, said Yang, with a question from McGuinness.) The group reported on the framework in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Yang says she hopes the model will help bring together parallel work from different disciplines. These disciplines have found separate effects at work in collective decision-making, “but we don’t yet have a holistic understanding that gives a recipe for good collective decision making,” she said. “Our work brings us one step closer to it.”

Abstract of the paper:

A key question concerning collective decisions is whether a social system can settle on the best available option when some members learn from others instead of evaluating the options on their own. This question is challenging to study, and previous research has reached mixed conclusions, because collective decision outcomes depend on the insufficiently understood complex system of cognitive strategies, task properties, and social influence processes. This study integrates these complex interactions together in one general yet partially analytically tractable mathematical framework using a dynamical system model. In particular, it investigates how the interplay of the proportion of social learners, the relative merit of options, and the type of conformity response affect collective decision outcomes in a binary choice. The model predicts that, when the proportion of social learners exceeds a critical threshold, a bistable state appears in which the majority can end up favoring either the higher- or lower-merit option, depending on fluctuations and initial conditions. Below this threshold, the high-merit option is chosen by the majority. The critical threshold is determined by the conformity response function and the relative merits of the two options. The study helps reconcile disagreements about the effect of social learners on collective performance and proposes a mathematical framework that can be readily adapted to extensions investigating a wider variety of dynamics.