The development of collective decision-making

We have previously developed a model of collective decision-making in the perceptual domain. Interestingly, the model over-estimated the collective performance of ‘children’ (aged 10-12) but not that of ‘adolescents’ (aged 14-16). The model assumes that individuals share their confidence in their individual judgements to figure out who is more likely to be correct in the case of disagreement. However, we have previously found that some groups do not talk about confidence when trying to resolve their disagreement, leading to 'sub-optimal' collective performance. Given findings that children (up to around 12 years of age) have difficulties using explicit probabilities to guide decision-making, we hypothesise that the children in our study were ‘sub-optimal’ because they did not converge on a shared set of linguistic expressions that were sensitive enough to the probabilistic affordances of the task (cf. expressions of confidence). To test this hypothesis, we are currently analysing how the children and the adolescents in our study resolved cases of disagreement.