Broomell, Stephen B Davis-Stober, Clintin P
Published in
Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science
Global climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the spread of misinformation on social media are just a handful of highly consequential problems affecting society. We argue that the rough contours of many societal problems can be framed within a "wisdom of crowds" perspective. Such a framing allows researchers to recast complex problems within a ...
Smaldino, Paul E Moser, Cody Pérez Velilla, Alejandro Werling, Mikkel
Published in
Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science
Humans regularly solve complex problems in cooperative teams. A wide range of mechanisms have been identified that improve the quality of solutions achieved by those teams on reaching consensus. We argue that many of these mechanisms work via increasing the transient diversity of solutions while the group attempts to reach a consensus. These mechan...
Martel, Cameron Allen, Jennifer Pennycook, Gordon Rand, David G
Published in
Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science
Identifying successful approaches for reducing the belief and spread of online misinformation is of great importance. Social media companies currently rely largely on professional fact-checking as their primary mechanism for identifying falsehoods. However, professional fact-checking has notable limitations regarding coverage and speed. In this art...
De Dreu, Carsten K W Gross, Jörg Romano, Angelo
Published in
Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science
Humans operate in groups that are oftentimes nested in multilayered collectives such as work units within departments and companies, neighborhoods within cities, and regions within nation states. With psychological science mostly focusing on proximate reasons for individuals to join existing groups and how existing groups function, we still poorly ...
Vlasceanu, Madalina Dyckovsky, Ari M Coman, Alin
Published in
Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science
Changing entrenched beliefs to alter people's behavior and increase societal welfare has been at the forefront of behavioral-science research, but with limited success. Here, we propose a new framework of characterizing beliefs as a multidimensional system of interdependent mental representations across three cognitive structures (e.g., beliefs, ev...
Tump, Alan N Deffner, Dominik Pleskac, Timothy J Romanczuk, Pawel M Kurvers, Ralf H J
Published in
Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science
Collective dynamics play a key role in everyday decision-making. Whether social influence promotes the spread of accurate information and ultimately results in adaptive behavior or leads to false information cascades and maladaptive social contagion strongly depends on the cognitive mechanisms underlying social interactions. Here we argue that cogn...
Warren, William H Falandays, J Benjamin Yoshida, Kei Wirth, Trenton D Free, Brian A
Published in
Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science
A ubiquitous type of collective behavior and decision-making is the coordinated motion of bird flocks, fish schools, and human crowds. Collective decisions to move in the same direction, turn right or left, or split into subgroups arise in a self-organized fashion from local interactions between individuals without central plans or designated leade...
Rabb, Nathaniel Geana, Mugur Sloman, Steven
Published in
Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science
The community-of-knowledge framework explains the extraordinary success of the human species, despite individual members' demonstrably shallow understanding of many topics, by appealing to outsourcing. People follow the cues of members of their community because understanding of phenomena is generally distributed across the group. Typically, commun...
Woolley, Anita Williams Gupta, Pranav
Published in
Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science
As society has come to rely on groups and technology to address many of its most challenging problems, there is a growing need to understand how technology-enabled, distributed, and dynamic collectives can be designed to solve a wide range of problems over time in the face of complex and changing environmental conditions-an ability we define as "co...
Goldenberg, Amit
Published in
Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science
When people experience emotions in a group, their emotions tend to have stronger intensity and to last longer. Why is that? This question has occupied thinkers throughout history, and with the use of digital media it is even more pressing today. Historically, attention has mainly focused on processes driven by the way emotions are shared between pe...
