Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-vfjqv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T12:23:58.525Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

IMPROVING DELIBERATIONS BY REDUCING MISREPRESENTATION EFFECTS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2018

Cyrille Imbert ,
Thomas Boyer-Kassem ,
Vincent Chevrier  and
Christine Bourjot
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Deliberative and decisional groups play crucial roles in most aspects of social life. But it is not obvious how to organize these groups and various socio-cognitive mechanisms can spoil debates and decisions. In this paper we focus on one such important mechanism: the misrepresentation of views, i.e. when agents express views that are aligned with those already expressed, and which differ from their private opinions. We introduce a model to analyze the extent to which this behavioral pattern can warp deliberations and distort the decisions that are finally taken. We identify types of situations in which misrepresentation can have major effects and investigate how to reduce these effects by adopting appropriate deliberative procedures. We discuss the beneficial effects of (i) holding a sufficient number of rounds of expression of views; (ii) choosing an appropriate order of speech, typically a random one; (iii) rendering the deliberation dissenter-friendly; (iv) having agents express fined-grained views. These applicable procedures help improve deliberations because they dampen conformist behavior, give epistemic minorities more opportunities to be heard, and reduce the number of cases in which an inadequate consensus or majority develops.

Type
Articles
Information
Episteme , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , December 2020 , pp. 403 - 419
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Allen, V. L. and Levine, J. M. 1968. ‘Social Support, Dissent and Conformity.’ Sociometry, 31(2): 138–49.10.2307/2786454CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Asch, S. E. 1951. ‘Effects of Group Pressure on the Modification and Distortion of Judgments.’ In Guetzkow, H. (ed.), Groups, Leadership and Men, pp. 177–90. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press.Google Scholar
Asch, S. E. 1955. ‘Opinions and Social Pressure.’ Scientific American, 193(5): 31–5.10.1038/scientificamerican1155-31CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Banerjee, A. V. 1992. ‘A Simple Model of Herd Behavior.’ Quarterly Journal of Economics, 107(3): 797–817.10.2307/2118364CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beatty, J. 2006. ‘Masking Disagreement among Experts.’ Episteme, 3(1–2): 52–67.10.3366/epi.2006.3.1-2.52CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beatty, J. and Moore, A. 2010. ‘Should We Aim for Consensus?’ Episteme, 7(3): 198–214.10.3366/epi.2010.0203CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bond, R. 2005. ‘Group Size and Conformity.’ Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 8(4): 331–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bright, L. K. 2017. ‘On Fraud.’ Philosophical Studies, 174(2): 291–310.10.1007/s11098-016-0682-7CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cialdini, R. B. and Griskevicius, V. 2010. ‘Social Influence.’ In Baumeister, R. and Finkel, E. (eds), Advanced Social Psychology: The State of the Science, pp. 385–418. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, J. 1986. ‘An Epistemic Conception of Democracy.’ Ethics, 97(1): 26–38.10.1086/292815CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deffuant, G., Neau, D., Amblard, F. and Weisbuch, G. 2000. ‘Mixing Beliefs Among Interacting Agents.’ Advances in Complex Systems, 3(1): 87–98.10.1142/S0219525900000078CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Douven, I. 2009. ‘Introduction: Computer Simulations in Social Epistemology.’ Episteme, 6(2): 107–9.10.3366/E1742360009000586CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elster, J. 2015. Secrecy and Publicity in Votes and Debates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Estlund, D. M. 2008. Democratic Authority: a Philosophical Framework. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Gilbert, M. 1987. ‘Modeling Collective Belief.’ Synthese, 73(1): 185–204.10.1007/BF00485446CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldman, A. I. 1999. Knowledge in a Social World. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hegselmann, R. and Krause, U. 2002. ‘Opinion Dynamics and Bounded Confidence: Models, Analysis and Simulation.’ Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 5(3).Google Scholar
Hogg, M. A. 2010. ‘Influence and Leadership.’ In Fiske, S. T., Gilbert, D. T. and Lindzey, G. (eds), The Handbook of Social Psychology, 5th edn, vol. 2, pp. 1166–206. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Google Scholar
Kosolosky, L. and Van Bouwel, J. 2014. ‘Explicating Ways of Consensus- Making in Science and Society: Distinguishing the Academic, the Interface and the Meta-Consensus.’ In Martini, C. and Boumans, M. (eds), Experts and Consensus in Social Science. New York, NY: Springer.Google Scholar
Kuhn, T. S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kuran, T. 1995. Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kuran, T. and Sunstein, C. R. 1998. ‘Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation.’ SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lackey, J. (ed.) 2014. Essays in Collective Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199665792.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Landemore, H. 2013. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Latané, B. 1981. ‘Psychology of Social Impact.’ American Psychologist, 36: 343–56.10.1037/0003-066X.36.4.343CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lehrer, K. and Wagner, C. 1981. Rational Consensus in Science and Society: A Philosophical and Mathematical Study. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.10.1007/978-94-009-8520-9CrossRefGoogle Scholar
List, C. and Goodin, R. E. 2001. ‘Epistemic Democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet Jury Theorem.’ Journal of Political Philosophy, 9(3): 277–306.10.1111/1467-9760.00128CrossRefGoogle Scholar
List, C. and Pettit, P. 2011. Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luskin, R. C., Fishkin, J. S. and Hahn, K. S. 2007. ‘Consensus and Polarization in Small Group Deliberations.’ Prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. Chicago, IL, 30 August–2 September.Google Scholar
Martini, C. and Boumans, M. (eds) 2014. Experts and Consensus in Social Science. New York, NY: Springer.10.1007/978-3-319-08551-7CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mayo-Wilson, C. 2014. ‘Reliability of Testimonial Norms in Scientific Communities.’ Synthese, 191(1): 55–78.10.1007/s11229-013-0320-2CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mill, J. S. 1859. On Liberty. London: John W. Parker and Son, West Strand.Google Scholar
Muldoon, R. 2013. ‘Diversity and the Division of Cognitive Labor.’ Philosophy Compass, 8(2): 117–25.10.1111/phc3.12000CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mullen, B. 1983. ‘Operationalizing the Effect of the Group on the Individual: a Self-Attention Perspective.’ Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 19: 295–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olsson, E. J. 2011. ‘A Simulation Approach to Veritistic Social Epistemology.’ Episteme, 8(2): 127–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schlesinger, A. M. Jr. 2002. ‘Cuba in the Cabinet Room.’ In A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Sunstein, C. R. 2000. ‘Deliberative Trouble? Why Groups Go to Extremes.’ Yale Law Journal, 110(1): 71–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sunstein, C. R. 2005. ‘Are Judges Conformists Too?’ In Why Societies Need Dissent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Sunstein, C. R. 2010. ‘Deliberating Groups Versus Piction Markets (or Hayek's Challenge to Habermas).’ Episteme, 3: 192–213.Google Scholar
Tanford, S. and Penrose, S. 1984. ‘Social Influence Model: A Formal Integra- tion of Research on Majority and Minority Influence Processes.’ Psychological Bulletin, 95: 176–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Urfalino, P. and Costa, P. 2015. ‘Secret-Public Voting in FDA Advisory Committees.’ In Elster, J. (ed.), Secrecy and Publicity in Votes and Debates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Weisbuch, G., Deffuant, G. and Amblard, F. 2005. ‘Persuasion Dynamics.’ Physica A, 353: 555–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zollman, K. 2010a. ‘Social Structure and the Effects of Conformity.’ Synthese, 172(3): 317–40.10.1007/s11229-008-9393-8CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zollman, K. 2010b. ‘The Epistemic Benefit of Transient Diversity.’ Erkenntnis, 72: 17–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zollman, K. 2012. ‘Social Network Structure and the Achievement of Consensus.’ Politics, Philosophy and Economics, 11(1): 26–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar