Neural Mechanisms Underlying Human Consensus Decision-Making

Consensus building in a group is a hallmark of animal societies, yet little is known about its underlying computational and neural mechanisms. Here, we applied a computational framework to behavioral and fMRI data from human participants performing a consensus decision-making task with up to five other participants. We found that participants reached consensus decisions through integrating their own preferences with information about the majority group members’ prior choices, as well as inferences about how much each option was stuck to by the other people. These distinct decision variables were separately encoded in distinct brain areas—the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, posterior superior temporal sulcus/temporoparietal junction, and intraparietal sulcus—and were integrated in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Our findings provide support for a theoretical account in which collective decisions are made through integrating multiple types of inference about oneself, others, and environments, processed in distinct brain modules

Martha\u27s Rules : An Alternative to Robert\u27s Rules of Order

For several years I have been teaching a social work course on how social workers can make their employing organization more responsive to consumers. We study how decisions are made in organizations. The students and I have become intrigued with the use of consensus decision-making in some organizations. Many—but by no means all—of these organizations are feminist organizations that wish to put feminist beliefs and philosophy into practice within organizations and to avoid structured administrative hierarchies for decision making. In their study of consensus decision-making organizations, students have reported that some participants are impatient with the time required by the use of consensus decision-making for all decisions—large and small. One student brought to class a copy of Martha’s Rules that were developed by Martha’s Housing Co-op for families in Madison, Wisconsin. Martha’s Rules are not only an alternative to Robert’s Rules, but provide ideas for people in organizations who are committed to consensus decision-making and who want to make it work well

Explaining Rising Regionalism and Failing Multilateralism: Consensus Decision-making and Expanding WTO membership

The beleaguered progress of the Doha Development Agenda of the WTO presents something of a puzzle for economic theory: if multilateralism is an effective forum for liberalisation (as it has been in the past), then why have the current round of talks faltered amid the proliferation of preferential trade negotiations? Several authors have argued that the consensus decision-making and single-undertaking principles of the WTO have lead to coordination failures amongst an increasingly expanded and diverse membership which has caused frustrated WTO members to form PTAs. This paper constructs a formal model which shows that the combination of the single-undertaking and consensus decision-making principles with an expanded and more diverse membership can lead to more than just coordination failure; it can render multilateralism less desirable for some parties than bilateralism. It is argued that these principles give countries de facto veto power meaning that their threat point during multilateral negotiations is a reversion to bilateral negotiations between all parties. Accordingly, countries with relatively less to gain from multilateralism can use their veto power to extract gains from those that would benefit substantially from the WTO. If an expanding membership has increased the number of such countries, then the benefits of multilateralism versus regionalism from the perspective of their negotiating partners may have been diminished to such an extent that they are no longer willing to wait for the conclusion of the Doha round before engaging in regional negotiations. This result adds credence to the idea that ‘variable geometry’ be introduced into the WTO system, such that it acts as an umbrella organisation for a web of sub-agreements.

Explaining rising regionalism and failing multilateralism: Consensus decision-making and expanding WTO membership

The beleaguered progress of the Doha Development Agenda of the WTO presents something of a puzzle for economic theory: if multilateralism is an effective forum for liberalisation (as it has been in the past), then why have the current round of talks faltered amid the proliferation of preferential trade negotiations? Several authors have argued that the consensus decision-making and single-undertaking principles of the WTO have lead to coordination failures amongst an increasingly expanded and diverse membership which has caused frustrated WTO members to form PTAs. This paper constructs a formal model which shows that the combination of the single-undertaking and consensus decision-making principles with an expanded and more diverse membership can lead to more than just coordination failure; it can render multilateralism less desirable for some parties than bilateralism. It is argued that these principles give countries de facto veto power meaning that their threat point during multilateral negotiations is a reversion to bilateral negotiations between all parties. Accordingly, countries with relatively less to gain from multilateralism can use their veto power to extract gains from those that would benefit substantially from the WTO. If an expanding membership has increased the number of such countries, then the benefits of multilateralism versus regionalism from the perspective of their negotiating partners may have been diminished to such an extent that they are no longer willing to wait for the conclusion of the Doha round before engaging in regional negotiations. This result adds credence to the idea that ‘variable geometry’ be introduced into the WTO system, such that it acts as an umbrella organisation for a web of sub-agreements.Multilateralism, Liberalisation, Trade negotiation, Variable geometry

Consensus Decision Making of Quality Improvement Teams: A Descriptive Study

This thesis reports on consensus decision making of quality improvement teams in the organizational setting. Specifically the study sought to determine whether a previously developed consensus instrument was a reliable and utilitarian measure of consensus. Analysis showed that the instrument was reliable, alpha = .9729, but its usefulness remains in question. Additionally, other research questions addressed the relationship between external expert stakeholders\u27 assessments of effectiveness and team members\u27 assessments as measured by the instrument. Analyses showed only minimal relationship. As an unanticipated result in three tests, a negative relationship was found between one rater\u27s rankings and a groups\u27 consensus levels as compared to other groups\u27 consensus levels. In tests of difference for sociodemographic variables, gender differences were found in the study, in that females consistently reported higher levels of consensus than their male peers. However, tests for the variables of age and title classification yielded no significant results

Together We Know A Lot: Consensus Decision Making in the Classroom

Student group work is common practice in many courses whether they are focused on writing theory or application. The purpose of this review is to introduce one strategy for teaching cooperative teamwork. It is easy to say to a group of students, “decide as a group…” It is less common, and I am certainly guilty of this, to provide clear directions on how to decide as a group. Consensus decision making (CDM, or sometimes known as CBDM, consensus-based decision making) is a common strategy for making decisions as a group in collective and community organizing. Used in the classroom, CDM can be a useful strategy that enables students to engage in meaningful discourse with one another. Because CDM emphasizes listening, compromise, and cooperation, it foregrounds dialogue rather than competition or adversarial debate. Ultimately, CDM helps students practice cooperation and open sharing of ideas, important skills in an age of increasing polarity. In the sections below, I first provide a short overview of CDM. Second, I discuss CDM within the context of classroom instruction and why CDM is useful in this particular context. Finally, I share some applications for teaching CDM

Multi-Stakeholder Consensus Decision-Making Framework Based on Trust and Risk

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)This thesis combines human and machine intelligence for consensus decision-making, and it contains four interrelated research areas. Before presenting the four research areas, this thesis presents a literature review on decision-making using two criteria: trust and risk. The analysis involves studying the individual and the multi-stakeholder decision-making. Also, it explores the relationship between trust and risk to provide insight on how to apply them when making any decision. This thesis presents a grouping procedure of the existing trust-based multi-stakeholder decision-making schemes by considering the group decision-making process and models. In the first research area, this thesis presents the foundation of building multi-stakeholder consensus decision-making (MSCDM). This thesis describes trust-based multi-stakeholder decision-making for water allocation to help the participants select a solution that comes from the best model. Several criteria are involved when deciding on a solution such as trust, damage, and benefit. This thesis considers Jain's fairness index as an indicator of reaching balance or equality for the stakeholder's needs. The preferred scenario is when having a high trust, low damages and high benefits. The worst scenario involves having low trust, high damage, and low benefit. The model is dynamic by adapting to the changes over time. The decision to select is the solution that is fair for almost everyone. In the second research area, this thesis presents a MSCDM, which is a generic framework that coordinates the decision-making rounds among stakeholders based on their influence toward each other, as represented by the trust relationship among them. This thesis describes the MSCDM framework that helps to find a decision the stakeholders can agree upon. Reaching a consensus decision might require several rounds where stakeholders negotiate by rating each other. This thesis presents the results of implementing MSCDM and evaluates the effect of trust on the consensus achievement and the reduction in the number of rounds needed to reach the final decision. This thesis presents Rating Convergence in the implemented MSCDM framework, and such convergence is a result of changes in the stakeholders' rating behavior in each round. This thesis evaluates the effect of trust on the rating changes by measuring the distance of the choices made by the stakeholders. Trust is useful in decreasing the distances. In the third research area, this thesis presents Rating Convergence in the implemented MSCDM framework, and such convergence is a result of changes in stakeholders' rating behavior in each round. This thesis evaluates the effect of trust on the rating changes by measuring the perturbation in the rating matrix. Trust is useful in increasing the rating matrix perturbation. Such perturbation helps to decrease the number of rounds. Therefore, trust helps to increase the speed of agreeing upon the same decision through the influence. In the fourth research area, this thesis presents Rating Aggregation operators in the implemented MSCDM framework. This thesis addresses the need for aggregating the stakeholders' ratings while they negotiate on the round of decisions to compute the consensus achievement. This thesis presents four aggregation operators: weighted sum (WS), weighted product (WP), weighted product similarity measure (WPSM), and weighted exponent similarity measure (WESM). This thesis studies the performance of those aggregation operators in terms of consensus achievement and the number of rounds needed. The consensus threshold controls the performance of these operators. The contribution of this thesis lays the foundation for developing a framework for MSCDM that facilitates reaching the consensus decision by accounting for the stakeholders' influences toward one another. Trust represents the influence

Anatomy of an organizational change effort at the Lewis Research Center

By 1979, after a long decline following the end of the Apollo program, the Lewis Research Center found its very existence endangered because it was not doing the kind of research that could attract funding at the time. New management under Andrew J. Stofan applied a program of strategic planning, participative management, and consensus decision making. A corporate-cultural change was effected which enabled Lewis to commit itself to four fundable research and development projects. Morale-building and training programs which were essential to this change are described

Computer simulation of leadership, consensus decision making and collective behaviour in humans

The aim of this study is to evaluate the reliability of a crowd simulation model developed by the authors by reproducing Dyer et al.’s experiments(published in Philosophical Transactions in 2009) on human leadership and consensus decision-­making in a computer-­based environment. The theoretical crowd model of the simulation environment is presented, and its results are compared and analysed against Dyer et al.’s original experiments. It is concluded that the results are 11 largely consistent with the experiments, which demonstrates the reliability of the crowd model. Furthermore, the simulation data also reveals several additional new findings, namely: 1) the phenomena of sacrificing accuracy to reach a quicker consensus decision found in ants colonies was also discovered in the simulation; 2) the ability of reaching consensus in groups has a direct impact on the time and accuracy of arriving at the target position; 3) the positions of the informed individuals or leaders in the crowd could have significant impact on the overall crowd movement; 4) the simulation also confirmed Dyer et al.’s anecdotal evidence of the proportion of the leadership in large crowds and its effect on crowd movement. The potential applications of these findings are highlighted in the final discussion of this paper