Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The allocation of scarce resources is a ubiquitous process in human societies, yet it is challenging to aggregate peoplesdiverse distributive viewpoints into group consensus. We investigate whether such heterogeneity in preferences may bereduced when people participate in group discussion in a distribution task. In two interactive experiments, we foundthat after group discussion, participants became less inequity-averse and preferred the maximin allocation. Analyses ofparticipants conversations and information-search behaviors showed that such shifts toward the maximin allocation werefacilitated by a strong concern for the worst-off recipient during group discussion. These results suggest that a maximinconcern exhibited in discussion helped participants to understand the difference between the inequity-aversion principleand the maximin principle, which are often confounded in individual judgments. These results provide empirical insightinto how social interaction can help to aggregate peoples diverse distributive preference into a social consensus.