A paper by Assistant Professor Masataka Nakayama and colleagues, entitled “Wisdom of Crowds and Collective Decision-Making in a Survival Situation with Complex Information Integration,” has been published in the online version of Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications

A paper by Assistant Professor Masataka Nakayama and colleagues, entitled “Wisdom of Crowds and Collective Decision-Making in a Survival Situation with Complex Information Integration,” has been published in the online version of Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications.

We make decisions every day. As well as individual decision-making, collective decisions-making, such as by government and corporate organizations, play an important role every day. This form of decision-making requires sophisticated judgement that integrates complex information. However, research on collective decision-making (consensual decision-making) and research on an algorithm called “Wisdom of Crowds” that aggregates the judgments of multiple individuals to make decisions has been limited to relatively simple problems (e.g., estimating the weight of a cow).

In this paper, in collaboration with Prof. Jun Saiki (Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University) and Dr. Daisuke Hamada (Researcher, Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University at that time), we used a complex decision-making task called the NASA “Survival on the Moon” task to compare between individual decision-making, collective decision-making and decision-making by an aggregation algorithm. As a result, it was shown that the collective decision-making and the decision-making by an aggregation algorithm were better than the individual decision-making even in the complicated task. Using simulations, we also examined the conditions under which the aggregation algorithm worked well.

This paper is open access and can be read using the link below.

Hamada, D., Nakayama, M. & Saiki, J. Wisdom of crowds and collective decision-making in a survival situation with complex information integration. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 5, 48 (2020).

https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-020-00248-z

2020/11/25