Biblio

Many species reach group decisions by deliberating in real-time systems. This natural process, known as Swarm Intelligence (SI), has been studied extensively in a range of social organisms, from schools of fish to swarms of bees. A new technique called Artificial Swarm Intelligence (ASI) has enabled networked human groups to reach decisions in systems modeled after natural swarms. The present research seeks to understand the behavioral dynamics of such “human swarms.” Data was collected from ten human groups, each having between 21 and 25 members. The groups were tasked with answering a set of 25 ordered ranking questions on a 1-5 scale, first independently by survey and then collaboratively as a real-time swarm. We found that groups reached significantly different answers, on average, by swarm versus survey ( p=0.02). Initially, the distribution of individual responses in each swarm was little different than the distribution of survey responses, but through the process of real-time deliberation, the swarm's average answer changed significantly ( ). We discuss possible interpretations of this dynamic behavior. Importantly, the we find that swarm's answer is not simply the arithmetic mean of initial individual “votes” ( ) as in a survey, suggesting a more complex mechanism is at play-one that relies on the time-varying behaviors of the participants in swarms. Finally, we publish a set of data that enables other researchers to analyze human behaviors in real-time swarms.

Groups often struggle to reach decisions, especially when populations are strongly divided by conflicting views. Traditional methods for collective decision-making involve polling individuals and aggregating results. In recent years, a new method called Artificial Swarm Intelligence (ASI) has been developed that enables networked human groups to deliberate in real-time systems, moderated by artificial intelligence algorithms. While traditional voting methods aggregate input provided by isolated participants, Swarm-based methods enable participants to influence each other and converge on solutions together. In this study we compare the output of traditional methods such as Majority vote and Borda count to the Swarm method on a set of divisive policy issues. We find that the rankings generated using ASI and the Borda Count methods are often rated as significantly more satisfactory than those generated by the Majority vote system (p\textbackslashtextless; 0.05). This result held for both the population that generated the rankings (the “in-group”) and the population that did not (the “out-group”): the in-group ranked the Swarm prioritizations as 9.6% more satisfactory than the Majority prioritizations, while the out-group ranked the Swarm prioritizations as 6.5% more satisfactory than the Majority prioritizations. This effect also held even when the out-group was subject to a demographic sampling bias of 10% (i.e. the out-group was composed of 10% more Labour voters than the in-group). The Swarm method was the only method to be perceived as more satisfactory to the “out-group” than the voting group.