Shared responsibility in collective decisions

Research investigating collective decision-making has focused primarily on the improvement of accuracy in collective decisions and less on the motives that drive individuals to make these decisions. We argue that a strong but neglected motive for making collective decisions is minimizing the materia...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature human behaviour 2019-06, Vol.3 (6), p.554-559
Main Authors: El Zein, Marwa, Bahrami, Bahador, Hertwig, Ralph
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
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Behavioral Sciences
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Collective responsibility
Cooperative Behavior
Decision making
Decision Making - physiology
Experimental Psychology
Group Processes
Humans
Life Sciences
Microeconomics
Motivation
Motivation - physiology
Natural disasters
Neurosciences
Personality and Social Psychology
Perspective
Punishment
Regret
Violations
Voting
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Summary:Research investigating collective decision-making has focused primarily on the improvement of accuracy in collective decisions and less on the motives that drive individuals to make these decisions. We argue that a strong but neglected motive for making collective decisions is minimizing the material and psychological burden of an individual’s responsibility. Making difficult decisions with others shields individuals from the consequences of negative outcomes by reducing regret, punishment and stress. Considering shared responsibility as a another key motivation to join groups helps understand behaviours with societal implications such as political voting, committing norm violations, predicting natural disasters and making health-related decisions. Why do people engage in collective decisions? El Zein, Bahrami & Hertwig argue that—through sharing responsibility—joint decisions protect individuals from possible negative consequences of difficult decisions by reducing regret and stress and helping avoid punishment.
ISSN:2397-3374
2397-3374
DOI:10.1038/s41562-019-0596-4