ArticleeLife2019
Quorums enable optimal pooling of independent judgements in biological systems.
Article in eLife, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- A minimal genetic circuit for cellular anticipation.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Human-AI collectives most accurately diagnose clinical vignettes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Collective Intelligence Increases Diagnostic Accuracy in a General Practice Setting.Medical decision making : an international journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making · 2024Article
- Automating hybrid collective intelligence in open-ended medical diagnostics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Avoiding costly mistakes in groups: The evolution of error management in collective decision making.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Subcritical escape waves in schooling fish.Science advances · 2022Article
- Quantifying the impact of network structure on speed and accuracy in collective decision-making.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2021Article
- Article
- Memory and communication efficient algorithm for decentralized counting of nodes in networks.PloS one · 2021Article
- The wisdom of stalemates: consensus and clustering as filtering mechanisms for improving collective accuracy.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Trail Pheromone Does Not Modulate Subjective Reward Evaluation inFrontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- How to detect high-performing individuals and groups: Decision similarity predicts accuracy.Science advances · 2019Article
- How does mobility help distributed systems compute?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
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
Abstract
Collective decision-making is ubiquitous, and majority-voting and the Condorcet Jury Theorem pervade thinking about collective decision-making. Thus, it is typically assumed that majority-voting is the best possible decision mechanism, and that scenarios exist where individually-weak decision-makers should not pool information. Condorcet and its applications implicitly assume that only one kind of error can be made, yet signal detection theory shows two kinds of errors exist, 'false positives' and 'false negatives'. We apply signal detection theory to collective decision-making to show that majority voting is frequently sub-optimal, and can be optimally replaced by quorum decision-making. While quorums have been proposed to resolve within-group conflicts, or manage speed-accuracy trade-offs, our analysis applies to groups with aligned interests undertaking single-shot decisions. Our results help explain the ubiquity of quorum decision-making in nature, relate the use of sub- and super-majority quorums to decision ecology, and may inform the design of artificial decision-making systems. Editorial note: This article has been through an editorial process in which the authors decide how to respond to the issues raised during peer review. The Reviewing Editor's assessment is that all the issues have been addressed (see decision letter).
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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.