Dan Jones has a good piece in New Scientist about the argumentative theory: The Argumentative Ape.
Asher Koriat published a paper in Science showing that in some cases discussion is unnecessary to advantageously combine opinions. Instead of letting people with two different opinions on a perceptual task talk with each other to figure out an answer, it may be just as efficient to ask for their confidence and take the answer of the most confident group member. While it's great to have practical means of opinion aggregation, this result shouldn't let us forget that in many cases, a group gets at a better solution not because they follow the most confident individual, but because they accept the best arguments -- as we pointed out in a letter to Science.
Our paper “Is the use of averaging in advice taking modulated by culture?” is officially published, by the Journal of Cognition and Culture. We show that Japanese and French participants use the same heuristics when taking advice into account. Both groups tend to underuse the efficient averaging, relying instead of a simple strategy of choosing either their own initial opinion or the advice (maybe you can guess which of these two is chosen more often...).
Brent Strickland and I have a new paper accepted about how people use social clues to evaluate arguments. It will appear in a special issue of Thinking and Reasoning dedicated to argumentation, under the superb editorship of Ulrike Hahn and Jos Hornikx.
I'm officially starting a new postdoc at the University of Neuchâtel! (as well as this 'News' page)
