Related papers: Group knowledge and individual introspection
"Wisdom of crowds" refers to the phenomenon that the average opinion of a group of individuals on a given question can be very close to the true answer. It requires a large group diversity of opinions, but the collective error, the…
This work examines a social learning problem, where dispersed agents connected through a network topology interact locally to form their opinions (beliefs) as regards certain hypotheses of interest. These opinions evolve over time, since…
Social learning, a fundamental process through which individuals shape their beliefs and perspectives via observation and interaction with others, is critical for the development of our society and the functioning of social governance.…
In this paper, we consider the problem of social learning, where a group of agents embedded in a social network are interested in learning an underlying state of the world. Agents have incomplete, noisy, and heterogeneous sources of…
We study a model of a population making a binary decision based on information spreading within the population, which is fully connected or covering a square grid. We assume that a fraction of the population wants to make the choice of the…
How do humans respond to indirect social influence when making decisions? We analysed an experiment where subjects had to repeatedly guess the correct answer to factual questions, while having only aggregated information about the answers…
We use a novel type of epistemic logic, employing comparative knowledge assertions, to analyze the relative epistemic powers of individuals or groups of agents. Such comparative assertions can express that a group has the potential to…
Complex systems show the capacity to aggregate information and to display coordinated activity. In the case of social systems the interaction of different individuals leads to the emergence of norms, trends in political positions, opinions,…
In this paper, we generalize epistemic logic so that it can help reason about ways of combining common knowledge and distributed knowledge such as "common distributed knowledge", "distributed common knowledge", "distributed common…
Motivated by the well established idea that collective wisdom is greater than that of an individual, we propose a novel learning dynamics as a sort of companion to the Abelson model of opinion dynamics. Agents are assumed to make…
Research on belief formation has produced contradictory findings on whether and when communication between group members will improve the accuracy of numeric estimates such as economic forecasts, medical diagnoses, and job candidate…
Why do collectives outperform individuals when solving some problems? Fundamentally, collectives have greater computational resources with more sensory information, more memory, more processing capacity, and more ways to act. While greater…
Being able to correctly aggregate the beliefs of many people into a single belief is a problem fundamental to many important social, economic and political processes such as policy making, market pricing and voting. Although there exist…
How do people acquire rich, flexible knowledge about their environment from others despite limited cognitive capacity? Humans are often thought to rely on computationally costly mentalizing, such as inferring others' beliefs. In contrast,…
Non-Bayesian social learning theory provides a framework that models distributed inference for a group of agents interacting over a social network. In this framework, each agent iteratively forms and communicates beliefs about an unknown…
The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis states that consciousness is a substrate-free functional property of computational systems capable of second-order perception. I propose a research program to investigate this idea in silico by studying…
The existence of a coalition strategy to achieve a goal does not necessarily mean that the coalition has enough information to know how to follow the strategy. Neither does it mean that the coalition knows that such a strategy exists. The…
We present a new model for reasoning about the way information is shared among friends in a social network, and the resulting ways in which it spreads. Our model formalizes the intuition that revealing personal information in social…
The existence of a coalition strategy to achieve a goal does not necessarily mean that the coalition has enough information to know how to follow the strategy. Neither does it mean that the coalition knows that such a strategy exists. The…
In this paper, we examine how patterns of scientific collaboration contribute to knowledge creation. Recent studies have shown that scientists can benefit from their position within collaborative networks by being able to receive more…