The Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to the

public defense of the PhD thesis

of Pavel Valeryevich Voinov:

Interpersonal Information Integration
in Judgment Revision and Collective Judgment Formation
The Benefits of Distributed Access to Redundant and
Complementary Visual Information in a Shared Environment

SUPERVISOR: GUNTHER KNOBLICH
SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: NATALIE SEBANZ

The defense will take place

at the Department of Cognitive Science,

V. Budapest, Október 6 street 7, 1st floor, room 101.

on Monday, May 29, 2017,

at 10:00 a.m.

Abstract

Collaboration has many potential benefits. One such benefit is to improve judgments under uncertainty where combining judgements from different people may lead to higher accuracy of joint judgments compared to individual judgments. The first aim of my dissertation was to enhance our understanding of the psychological mechanisms that allow interacting individuals to combine individual perceptions into a joint judgment. The second aim was to determine the causes of collective benefit and collective failure in this process. A first series of experiments investigated how people can improve their own judgment when they observe another’s judgments in a shared environment. The main finding was that people can only benefit from observing another’s judgment when they are relatively certain about their own judgment. When people are uncertain about their own judgment, they tend not to realize that another person is in a better position to make an accurate judgment. The second series of experiments investigated whether there is an improved benefit if two individuals are asked to provide one joint judgment both individuals agree on through interacting in a shared environment. The main finding was that under conditions of access to complementary information minimal means of negotiating joint judgments in a shared environment are sufficient to establish a reliable and close to optimal collective benefit from interaction. Importantly, verbal communication was not necessary to achieve this benefit. Together, the two series of experiments emphasize the crucial role of reaching consensus in boosting collective benefit from joint judgments. Whether individuals hold the same or complementary information is a further important determinant of the collective benefit that collaborators can obtain. The full advantage of distributed access to complementary information can be realized only if people reach a shared agreement on a joint judgment.