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What Failure in Collective Decision-Making Tells Us About Metacognition

Collective Failure and Metacognition

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The Cognitive Neuroscience of Metacognition

Abstract

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.

This chapter is adapted from: Bahrami B, Olsen K, Bang D, Roepstorff A, Rees G, Frith C (2012) What failure in collective decision-making tells us about metacognition. Phil Trans R Soc B 367:1350–1365

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Interestingly, his major case studies, financial bubbles and religious conflicts over Jerusalem, do not show any signs of running out of steam yet.

  2. 2.

    The names chosen for the cricket umpires are inspired by Graham Greene’s (1940) The Power and the Glory (Qodrat o Jalal).

  3. 3.

    The confidence ratio µ i /σ i can be monotonically transformed into P(x > 0), which gives the probability of being correct given perceptual sample x. The decision rule (µQ/σQ + µJ/σJ) is thus equivalent to accepting the decision of the person with the higher probability of being correct (i.e. the higher confidence µ i /σ i ). See the Supplementary Materials to Bahrami et al. [9] for further mathematical details.

  4. 4.

    Thomas Bayes (http://bit.ly/f0uTBk) would perhaps have found the bias for favouring redundant and frequent information only wise and sensible. In the words of Bellman in Lewis Carrol’s brilliant The Hunting of the Snark,

    ‘JUST the place for a Snark!’ the Bellman cried,

    As he landed his crew with care;

    Supporting each man on the top of the tide

    By a finger entwined in his hair.

    ‘Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:

    That alone should encourage the crew.

    Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:

    What I tell you three times is true.’

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship (BB), European Research Council (NeuroCoDec, grant number 309865), the Calleva Research Centre for Evolution and Human Sciences (DB), the Danish National Research Foundation and the Danish Research Council for Culture and Communication (BB, KO, AR, CF) and by the Wellcome Trust (GR). Support from the MINDLab UNIK initiative at Aarhus University was funded by the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3UD, UK

    Dan Bang

  2. Calleva Research Centre for Evolution and Human Sciences, Magdalen College, High Street, Oxford, OX1 4AU, UK

    Dan Bang

  3. The Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University, Jens Chr. Skous Vej 4, Building 1483, 8000, Aarhus, Denmark

    Dan Bang, Karsten Olsen, Andreas Roepstorff, Chris Frith & Bahador Bahrami

  4. Control and Intelligent Processing Centre of Excellence, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, North Kargar Avenue, Tehran, Iran

    Ali Mahmoodi

  5. School of Cognitive Science, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), Bahonar Square, Tehran, Iran

    Ali Mahmoodi

  6. UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, Alexandra House, London, WC1N 3AR, UK

    Geraint Rees & Bahador Bahrami

  7. Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, WC1N 3BG, UK

    Geraint Rees, Chris Frith & Bahador Bahrami

Authors
  1. Dan Bang
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  2. Ali Mahmoodi
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  3. Karsten Olsen
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  7. Bahador Bahrami
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Correspondence to Dan Bang .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, New York, USA

    Stephen M. Fleming

  2. Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus C, Denmark

    Christopher D. Frith

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Bang, D. et al. (2014). What Failure in Collective Decision-Making Tells Us About Metacognition. In: Fleming, S., Frith, C. (eds) The Cognitive Neuroscience of Metacognition. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45190-4_9

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