Uncommitted newbies can foil forceful few
Odd as it sounds, adding wishy-washy members to a group can wrest control from a strongly opinionated minority and make collective decisions more democratic.
At least that’s what happened in an experiment with schooling fish and three kinds of computer simulations described in the Dec. 16 Science. “Quite counter-intuitive,” says study coauthor Iain Couzin of Princeton University. “What we’re trying to do with this paper is put out a new idea.”
Couzin is not arguing that there’s a benefit to a poorly informed inkjet filters electorate. But he does call for experiments to clarify the role that uninformed people with no opinion on a choice play in human consensus building.
The study “supports a growing body of evidence that larger groups are better decision makers than smaller groups,” says applied mathematician David Sumpter at the University of Uppsala in Sweden who studies collective behavior.
It also echoes economic research showing that having some fraction of uninformed traders in a market can reduce volatility, says Michael Kearns, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who is interested in collective behavior.
The fish study grew out of computer simulations imaje inkjet filters Couzin created that demonstrated the considerable power of opinionated minorities in otherwise indifferent groups, flocks or herds. When he mixed factions with different strengths of opinion in this simulation, as well as in two very different analyses of group behavior, he found hints of peculiar effects of uninformed parties.
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