ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2018
Individuals fail to reap the collective benefits of diversity because of over-reliance on personal information.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Human learning is an understudied but promising lever for boosting human-AI synergy.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Pooled it
- Individual differences in speed-accuracy trade-off influence social decision-making in dyads.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Humans flexibly integrate social information despite interindividual differences in reward.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Earlier social information has a stronger influence on judgments.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The inverted U-shaped relationship between knowledge diversity of researchers and societal impact.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Crowd control: Reducing individual estimation bias by sharing biased social information.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Cultural diversity and wisdom of crowds are mutually beneficial and evolutionarily stable.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Social information use and social information waste.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Wise or mad crowds? The cognitive mechanisms underlying information cascades.Science advances · 2020Article
- Comparing Groups of Independent Solvers and Transmission Chains as Methods for Collective Problem-Solving.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- How to detect high-performing individuals and groups: Decision similarity predicts accuracy.Science advances · 2019Article
- Article
- Social information use in adolescents: The impact of adults, peers and household composition.PloS one · 2019Article
- Identification of acutely sick people: individual differences and social information use.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Collective intelligence refers to the ability of groups to outperform individuals in solving cognitive tasks. Although numerous studies have demonstrated this effect, the mechanisms underlying collective intelligence remain poorly understood. Here, we investigate diversity in cue beliefs as a mechanism potentially promoting collective intelligence. In our experimental study, human groups observed a sequence of cartoon characters, and classified each character as a cooperator or defector based on informative and uninformative cues. Participants first made an individual decision. They then received social information consisting of their group members' decisions before making a second decision. Additionally, individuals reported their beliefs about the cues. Our results showed that individuals made better decisions after observing the decisions of others. Interestingly, individuals developed different cue beliefs, including many wrong ones, despite receiving identical information. Diversity in cue beliefs, however, did not predict collective improvement. Using simulations, we found that diverse collectives did provide better social information, but that individuals failed to reap those benefits because they relied too much on personal information. Our results highlight the potential of belief diversity for promoting collective intelligence, but suggest that this potential often remains unexploited because of over-reliance on personal information.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.