Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Intuitively, adding uninformed individuals to a group should undermine group efficiency, as they create coordination costs while lacking the expertise to meaningfully contribute. However, uninformed individuals may be able to overcome deadlocks in otherwise polarized groups by heightening conformity pressures. Modeling group members’ decision making using a sequential sampling model based on Decision Field Theory (DFT: Busemeyer & Townsend, 1993), we present an existence proof of how ignorance can, in contrast to intuition and prominent economic accounts, facilitate improved group decision making. The implications of these findings for cognitive science, organizational behavior, and social impact are discussed.