Herding cats: children’s intuitive theories of persuasion predict slower collective decisions in larger and more diverse groups, but disregard factional power
Abstract
Collaboration can make collective judgments more accurate than individual judgments, but it also comes with costs in time, effort, and social cohesion. But how do we estimate these costs? In two experiments, we introduce children and adults to two teams in which the teammates disagree about the optimal solution to a novel problem, and ask which team would need more time to reach a consensus decision. We find that all ages expect slower decisions from teams with more people or factions, and expect the number of factions to matter more than the number of people. But only adults expect decisions initially endorsed by a stronger faction to be faster than those endorsed by a weaker faction. Results are discussed in context of children’s reasoning about dominance, and models of time-rational collective decision-making.