Anchoring in Deliberations
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Anchoring in Deliberations Stephan Hartmann1 • Soroush Rafiee Rad1,2 Received: 2 May 2017 / Accepted: 17 September 2018 Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Deliberation is a standard procedure for making decisions in not too large groups. It has the advantage that group members can learn from each other and that, at the end, often a consensus emerges that everybody endorses. Unfortunately, however, implementing a deliberation procedure also has a number of disadvantages due to the cognitive limitations of the individual group members. What is more, the very process of deliberation introduces an additional bias, which we investigate in this article. We demonstrate that even in a group of (boundedly) rational agents the resulting consensus (if there is one) depends on the order in which the group members speak. More specifically, the group member who speaks first has an unproportionally high impact on the final decision, which we interpret as a new instance of the well-known anchoring effect. To show this, we construct and analyze an agent-based model— inspired by the disagreement debate in social epistemology—and obtain analytical results for homogeneous groups (i.e., for groups whose members consider each other as epistemic peers) as well as simulation results for inhomogeneous groups.
1 Introduction There are numerous instances of group decision-making in our daily practice. For example, families have to decide on where to spend the summer holidays, funding agencies have to decide which research projects to support, expert panels have to decide which advice to give, and juries in courts have to decide whether a defendant & Soroush Rafiee Rad [email protected] http://www.rafieerad.org Stephan Hartmann [email protected] http://www.stephanhartmann.org 1
Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU Munich, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, 80539 Munich, Germany
2
Department of Philosophy, University of Bayreuth, 95440 Bayreuth, Germany
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is guilty or not. Sometimes a decision is made in the light of different preferences (and each group member wants to get the best out of it for herself), and sometimes all group members share the conviction that the resulting decision should be best in some sense that is commonly agreed upon. Juries in court, for example, aim at making the right decision: every jury member wants that a guilty defendant be convicted, and no one wants that an innocent defendant be sent to prison. Likewise, committees such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deliberate to arrive at the best policy recommendations (see, e.g., Oreskes 2004). Many real-life decisions are somewhere in between these two extremes: personal preferences play a role, but there is often also some overarching goal that all group members share. Decisions of funding agencies are a case in point. Here one wants, on the one hand, to fund the best researchers who have applied. On the other hand, some research
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