The advantages of groups over individuals in complex decision-making have long interested scientists across disciplinary divisions. Averaging over a collection of individual judgments proves a reliable strategy for aggregating information, particularly in diverse groups in which statistically independent beliefs fall on both sides of the truth and contradictory biases are cancelled out. Social influence, some have said, narrows variation in individual opinions and undermines this wisdom-of-crowds effect in continuous estimation tasks. Researchers, however, neglected to study social-influence effects on voting in discrete choice tasks. Using agent-based simulation, we show that under voting — the most widespread social decision rule — social influence contributes to information aggregation and thus strengthens collective judgment. Adding to our knowledge about complex systems comprised of adaptive agents, this finding has important ramifications for the design of collective decision-making in both public administration and private firms.

中文翻译：

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社会影响力增强了投票下的群众智慧

在复杂的决策中，群体相对于个人的优势长期以来一直引起跨学科科学家的兴趣。对一组个人判断进行平均证明了一种聚合信息的可靠策略，特别是在不同的群体中，在这些群体中，统计上独立的信念落在真理的两边，相互矛盾的偏见被抵消了。一些人说，社会影响缩小了个人意见的差异，并破坏了连续估计任务中的这种群体智慧效应。然而，研究人员忽略了研究社会影响对离散选择任务中投票的影响。使用基于代理的模拟，我们表明，在投票（最普遍的社会决策规则）下，社会影响有助于信息聚合，从而加强集体判断。