Collective Intelligence
People rarely make decisions in isolation. Instead, they tap into the information and knowledge provided by their social environment—that is, by the people around them—to make better decisions. Under some conditions, though, the social environment can also pose a threat—for example, when crowds stampede or political opinions polarize. The ability to successfully navigate the social environment is a key competence for adaptive decision making in an uncertain world.
Wisdom of Human and Hybrid Crowds
One powerful method for boosting decision accuracy is to combine the independent judgments of different people—or of humans and machines working together. These collective approaches with human or hybrid “crowds” are often more accurate than the judgments of single individuals or single machines.
We examine when and why different ways of aggregating information lead to improved collective performance. To this end, we combine empirical research methods (e.g., large online studies, lab studies, virtual reality, and hybrid crowds) with advanced theoretical modeling. We also apply the insights gained from this research to real-world contexts with high stakes, including medical diagnostics, human crowds (e.g., during emergency evacuations), and geopolitical forecasting, with the aim of enabling decision makers to make better decisions by joining forces with other humans or machines.
Use of Social Information
How do people tap into the information they get from others? To answer this question, we first need to understand how and when people search for social information, how they integrate conflicting personal and social information, how information flows through populations, and how these processes are shaped by the structure of social interactions and by individual characteristics like confidence and expertise.
Our research combines empirical studies observing real-world behavior with theoretical simulations that scale up the observed behaviors to larger populations. We use cognitive modeling techniques to better understand how people integrate personal and social information, and how groups arrive at joint decisions. We also study how individuals and groups can interact with large language models (LLMs) to unlock new forms of collective intelligence.
Collective Decision Making in the Wild
Understanding how people make decisions together in everyday life is a key challenge in psychology, but one that is often overlooked. Recent advances in high-resolution tracking technologies have made it possible to measure human behavior in social contexts at scale.
Our research combines such approaches with formal psychological theory to investigate the mechanisms of real-world decision making. For example, we have studied ice-fishing competitions in Finland, integrating high-precision GPS tracking data and video footage with cognitive computational modeling. This approach allows us to study how ice fishers integrate personal, social, and ecological information to decide where to fish and when to move on. Our work demonstrates how high-resolution tracking data can be harnessed to study human cognition in natural settings.
Fieldwork video from an ice fishing competition in Finland
References
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