Responsible policy-makers should consult widely before reaching their decisions. This is trivial. It is also wrong, according to new research. A neat experiment at Nottingham University shows how consultation can be counter-productive.
They got subjects to say whether a couple of paintings were by Paul Klee or Wassily Kandinsky. The subjects were split into two groups. One group comprised individuals making their own decisions. The other comprised individuals who were assigned to teams of six and allowed to consult team members.
And members of the teams did worse. Whereas only 29% of individuals got both paintings wrong, a whopping 51% of team members did so - twice as many as you'd expect by chance.
There was, however, no significant difference in the proportions getting both questions right: 38% of individuals versus 36% of team members.
Consultation, then, increases the chances of a bad decision, without improving the chances of a good one. What's more, people don't realize this; most said that they found the consultation process helpful.
The reason for this is that people are misled into giving wrong answers by team members who are irrationally over-confident, because these send out more (false) competence cues. 'Individuals who know little are swayed by those who know less' say the researchers. (This is more true for women than men, but let's not go there.)
There is, though, a crucial thing about this result.
It all hinges upon whether the answer to a question is demonstrable or not. If it is demonstrable, then an expert who knows the answer can prove that he does so by using logic or evidence, and non-experts will defer to him. Consultation will then work, simply by virtue of bringing expertise into play.
But some knowledge is non-demonstrable. The expert might be able to distinguish between Klee and Kandinsky, but he'll find it harder to demonstrate his expertise to laymen than, say, a mathematician will be able to demonstrate that he knows the solution to an equation. And where knowledge is non-demonstrable, people might follow false experts.
This, I fear, might have widespread implications. Juries, for example, are asked to find a non-demonstrable answer.
It suggests that public consultation exercises must be carefully designed - or least they should, insofar as the object of them is to reach the correct decision, which might not always be the case.