Katsikopoulos,K.V.
Reimer,T.

(from the chapter) Imagine a three-member search committee that has to decide which of two candidates to invite for a faculty interview. The committee operates as follows: First, each member individually selects a favored candidate. Then, all three members attempt to reach consensus. The two candidates are Ms. Unknown and Ms. Known, and there are funds to invite just one of them. Two committee members are familiar with both candidates, and each proposes that Ms. Unknown be invited. The third committee member, however, has never heard of Ms. Unknown. Despite being slightly embarrassed, he admits his ignorance and is relieved when his colleagues point out that it might mean something: If he has never heard of Ms. Unknown, she might well not be as good for the job as Ms. Known, of whom he has heard. How do they settle on whom to pick? The majority rule specifies Ms. Unknown. But could it be possible that a committee would take the potential wisdom of ignorance into account and put the votes together differently? And if so, would that also be wise? To find out, we developed a mathematical model of group decision making applicable to situations such as the search committee example and tested it with groups of people interacting in an experimental setting. The model consists of two components. The first, for individual inference, is the recognition heuristic (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 1999, 2002). The second component combines the individual inferences and captures the impact of different group members. For this component, we test several group decision rules, starting with the majority rule studied in group psychology (Sorkin, West, & Robinson, 1998) and proceeding to new lexicographic rules that take name recognition into account. We first use analysis to investigate the ecological rationality of different group rules with respect to two aspects of environmental structure: individual knowledge and group make-up. We study how the validity of recognition and of further knowledge affect the accuracy of the rules. In addition, we study how the composition of the group-in terms of the number of members who use recognition versus the number who use other cues-affects rule accuracy. We then test experimentally whether real groups pay attention to lack of recognition when it is ecologically rational to do so (Reimer & Katsikopoulos, 2004). The exercise allows us a glimpse of how it can be that groups succeed in reasoning simply and smartly, by considering who knows-or does not know-what. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Katsikopoulos, K. V., & Reimer, T. (2012). How groups use partial ignorance to make good decisions. In P. M. Todd, G. Gigerenzer, & the ABC Research Group, Ecological rationality: Intelligence in the world (pp. 167-183). New York: Oxford University Press.

Publication year	2012
Document type:	In book
Publication status:	Published
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Keywords:	*group decision making*heuristic modeling*heuristics*rationalityecology