ReviewEvolutionary human sciences2019
Majority rules: how good are we at aggregating convergent opinions?
Review in Evolutionary human sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- When Others Agree More Closely: Judgment Similarity Influences Conformity.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- The marginal majority effect: When social influence produces lock-in.Science advances · 2026Article
- How Convincing Is a Crowd? Quantifying the Persuasiveness of a Consensus for Different Individuals and Types of Claims.Psychological science · 2025Article
- Mandevillian vices.Synthese · 2024Article
- Overcoming Individual Limitations Through Distributed Computation: Rational Information Accumulation in Multigenerational Populations.Topics in cognitive science · 2022Article
- Sensitivity to Evidential Dependencies in Judgments Under Uncertainty.Cognitive science · 2022Article
- What is the extent of a frequency-dependent social learning strategy space?Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- 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
- Strategies for integrating disparate social information.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Learning from multiple informants: Children's response to epistemic bases for consensus judgments.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2020Article
- Obstacles to the spread of unintuitive beliefs.Evolutionary human 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
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Mathematical models and simulations demonstrate the power of majority rules, i.e. following an opinion shared by a majority of group members. Majority opinion should be followed more when (a) the relative and absolute size of the majority grow, the members of the majority are (b) competent, and (c) benevolent, (d) the majority opinion conflicts less with our prior beliefs and (e) the members of the majority formed their opinions independently. We review the experimental literature bearing on these points. The few experiments bearing on (b) and (c) suggest that both factors are adequately taken into account. Many experiments show that (d) is also followed, with participants usually putting too much weight on their own opinion relative to that of the majority. Regarding factors (a) and (e), in contrast, the evidence is mixed: participants sometimes take into account optimally the absolute and relative size of the majority, as well as the presence of informational dependencies. In other circumstances, these factors are ignored. We suggest that an evolutionary framework can help make sense of these conflicting results by distinguishing between evolutionarily valid cues - that are readily taken into account - and non-evolutionarily valid cues - that are ignored by default.
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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.