Speaker
Description
How do people make better—or sometimes worse—decisions when they face uncertainty together? Over the past decade, experimental and theoretical work has begun to map the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie interactive decision-making. I will start by discussing how pairs of individuals may outperform their best member when they share information and confidence. Recent large-scale and cross-cultural studies extend this picture: they reveal the limits of such “two-heads-better-than-one” effects, showing when deliberation enhances accuracy and when it systematically fails. To explain these patterns, we turn to the dynamics of information exchange and belief updating, highlighting the role of confidence weighting, epistemic trust, and social calibration. At the neural level, I present a study demonstrating inter-personal coupling of decision evidence accumulation and confidence generation (Esmaily et al., eLife, 2023) via computational modeling and tested with EEG. Together, these findings provide a multi-level account of how people integrate uncertainty in social contexts—combining behavioral, cross-cultural, neural, and computational evidence—and raise new questions about designing institutions and technologies that harness, rather than hinder, our collective intelligence.
