Steven Sloman
Brown University, RI·Psychology
Most important decisions in government and business are made by groups that talk things through. Yet group discussion often fails, especially when members disagree politically.
- Fields
Psychology
Social Science
- Topics
group decision making
adversarial cooperation
deliberation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Test whether small groups of partisans with opposing views generate better solutions to politicized problems during a conjecture phase than ideologically mixed groups that deliberate or groups that simply combine members' judgments.
- Test whether adversarial groups stress-test proposed solutions more effectively through evidence-based refutation, with members defending their own ideas and challenging others' ideas, in behavioral experiments.
- Examine whether argument-based refutation in adversarial groups leads them to agree on the best decision more reliably than other ways of reaching a group decision.
- Determine whether larger groups that include people with adversarial perspectives make more accurate judgments and predictions than groups lacking those perspectives.
More about the research
This project proposes and tests a theory of effective group discussion called adversarial cooperation. The theory builds on a simple idea: people judge ideas they disagree with more carefully than they judge their own ideas.
Why it matters
Public policy and business outcomes depend on how well groups reach decisions. If adversarial cooperation proves effective, it could give committees, agencies and organizations a concrete way to structure discussion, especially among politically divided members. The results could show how to turn disagreement into more accurate judgments and predictions instead of letting it cause gridlock.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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Veljko Dubljevic
North Carolina State University, NC·Social Science·Early-career
Develop new moral scenarios about potentially harmful traffic decisions involving vehicles and pedestrians, and render them as animations in an immersive virtual reality setting for controlled testing of moral judgment.
Grant Schoenebeck
University of Michigan, MI·Computer Science
Develop models of informed group decision making that combine agents' subjective and objective preferences, information and answers to questions, drawing on social choice theory and information elicitation.
The school
Brown University: 23 labs on PI Pages, $375M a year on research, 251 research doctorates a year.
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