Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous studies have shown that people can make adaptive in-ferences based on memory-based simple heuristics such asrecognition, fluency, or familiarity heuristic. In the presentstudy, we discussed the adaptive nature of memory-based sim-ple heuristics in a group decision making setting. In particular,we examined how the diversity of memory affected group de-cision making when group members were assumed to make in-ferences based on the familiarity heuristic. We predicted that,when the group members’ memories were diverse, group deci-sion making would become more accurate. To examine thisprediction, we conducted a behavioral experiment and com-puter simulations, and our results generally supported the pre-diction. We discuss the role of diverse memories in generatingadaptive group decision making.