Does interaction matter? Testing whether a confidence heuristic can replace interaction in collective decision-making

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2014.02.002Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • We tested whether a confidence heuristic could replace interaction in a collective perceptual decision-making task.

  • For individuals of nearly equal reliability, the confidence heuristic is just as accurate as interaction.

  • For individuals with different reliabilities, the confidence heuristic is less accurate than interaction.

  • Interacting individuals use the credibility of each other’s confidence estimates to guide their joint decisions.

  • Interacting individuals face a problem of how to map ‘internal’ variables onto ‘external’ (shareable) variables.

Abstract

In a range of contexts, individuals arrive at collective decisions by sharing confidence in their judgements. This tendency to evaluate the reliability of information by the confidence with which it is expressed has been termed the ‘confidence heuristic’. We tested two ways of implementing the confidence heuristic in the context of a collective perceptual decision-making task: either directly, by opting for the judgement made with higher confidence, or indirectly, by opting for the faster judgement, exploiting an inverse correlation between confidence and reaction time. We found that the success of these heuristics depends on how similar individuals are in terms of the reliability of their judgements and, more importantly, that for dissimilar individuals such heuristics are dramatically inferior to interaction. Interaction allows individuals to alleviate, but not fully resolve, differences in the reliability of their judgements. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of confidence and collective decision-making.

Keywords

Collective decision-making
Interaction
Confidence
Reaction time
Heuristic
Perception
Metacognition
Signal detection theory
Computational

Cited by (0)