Research

Contradictory maxims such as “two heads are better than one” and “too many cooks spoil the broth” raise the question WHY people engage in collective decisions. We propose that an overlooked and very important reason to join collectives is sharing responsibility for decision outcomes. Sharing responsibility with others protects individuals from possible negative consequences of difficult and uncertain decisions by reducing regret, punishment and stress. We explain our proposed framework in detail in our perspective paper (El Zein, Bahrami & Hertwig, Nature Human Behaviour) see the figure below. You can hear me talking about this in this video.

Motives to join a collective decision can relate to the decision process itself and its anticipated outcome. These motives include improving outcomes (combining effort and pooling intelligence, underlined); social inclusion and normative needs (in italic); and critically for us: shared responsibility (in bold). Of course, an important question is how all these different factors interact or add up to motivate people to engage in a collective decision.

We conduct behavioral (online and in the lab) and neuroimaging experiments inspired from neuroeconomics and social psychology to empirically address questions related to this framework, for example:

• • On regret: Do people anticipate less regret when deciding in group? Does experienced regret influence the choice to play alone or in a group? Is the group protected from negative consequences of costly decisions? The answers are in this published paper.

  • On punishment: Do people violate norms more easily if they are part of a group because of the sharing of responsibility? Is punishment reduced for an individual in a collective structure? The answers are in this published paper.

=> The results of these 2 last papers are also summarized in this blog post.

• • Neural basis of shared responsibility: using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we investigate the cognitive and neural basis of shared responsibility during collective decisions, from the moment participants are informed they are part of a group to the moment they make a collective decision, to the moment they process the outcome: check out our published paper here.