Responsibilities
ERC Group Leader
Contact
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences
Gabelsbergerstr. 62
D-80333 Munich
Email:
bahador.bahrami@psy.lmu.de
Website:
https://crowdcognition.net
Further Information
Keywords: social neuroscience, decision making, confidence, influence, consensus, collective decision making, disagreement, negotiation, brain, fMRI
GSN Students: Jamal Esmaily
Research Focus: Humans interact with each other to share information and make decisions. Our lab investigates the cognitive and neurobiological basis of interactive decision making. We use behavioural psychological testing, functional and structural brain imaging and psychopharmacology techniques to understand human interactive behaviour. Our research is organized in the following main branches:
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Communication of Subjective Uncertainty
Humans and other animals integrate noisy sensory input to infer the state of the world, and guide action and choice. Action selection is accompanied by a ‘sense of confidence’, a subjective feeling about the validity of the choice. One of the most intriguing features of confidence is that humans tend to communicate this feeling in a largely idiosyncratic way: although confidence reports are typically stable within each person, they tend to be variable across the population.
This creates a fundamental problem for communication: how do we interpret other people’s confidence? How do we accurately communicate to them what we have in mind? Our most recent works on this topic here:
Navajas, J., et al (2017). The idiosyncratic nature of confidence. Nature Human Behaviour, doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0215-1.
Mahmoodi, A., Bang, B., Olsen, K., Zhao, Y.A., Shi, Z., Broberg, K., Safavi, S., Han, S., Ahmadabadi, M.N., Chris, D.F., Roepstorff, A., Rees, G., and Bahrami, B. Equality bias impairs collective decision-making across cultures. PNAS (2015) 12, 3835–3840 -
Manipulation by Strategic Expression of Uncertainty
The role of social influence in our lives cannot be overstated. Critical issues ranging from the outcomes of political campaigns to our stand on issues such as global warming, immigration and taxation, depend on people trying to persuade the general public. Research on social influence has been dominated by the motivation to understand the minds of the TARGET of influence – the “clients” - (e.g., consumers, voters) in order to exert even more influence on them. Far less is known about the cognitive and neurobiological processes at play in the persuaders – the “advisers” (e.g. politicians, salesmen).
Social influence is most relevant when in human interactive decision making under uncertainty (e.g. parliaments, court juries, corporate boards). We develop laboratory models for how human agents may use strategic expressions of their confidence to influence the preferences and decisions of others. Here is a preprint of our most recent work on this topic:
Hertz, U., Palminteri, S., Brunetti, S., Olesen, C., Frith, CD., Bahrami, B. Neural computations underpinning the strategic management of influence in advice giving. Nature Communications (2017)
Mahmoodi, A., Bahrami, B., Mehring, C. Reciprocity of social influence. Nature Communications. (accepted) -
Aggregating Uncertain Opinions in Deliberation
The aggregation of many independent estimates can outperform the most accurate individual judgment. Such “wisdom of crowds” has recently been applied to problems ranging from the diagnosis of cancer to financial forecasting. It is widely believed that social influence undermines collective wisdom by reducing the diversity of opinions within the crowd. Our research shows that if a large crowd is structured in small independent groups, deliberation and social influence within groups improve the crowd’s collective accuracy.
Our research now focuses on the psychological and computational characteristics of the deliberation process in order to understand how we can use them to help human groups make better decisions. Here is one of our most recent work: Navajas, J., Niella, T., Garbulsky, G., Bahrami, B., & Sigman, M. Aggregated knowledge from a small number of debates outperforms the wisdom of large crowds. Nature Human Behavior (2018)
- Ralf Kurvers, Uri Hertz, Jurgis Karpus, Marta Balode, Bertrand Jayles, Ken Binmore, Bahador Bahrami. (2021). Disinformation trumps honesty in competition for social influence“. In press
- Karpus, J., Krüger, A., Verba, J.T., Bahrami, B., Deroy, O. (2021) Algorithm exploitation: humans are keen to exploit benevolent AI. iScience https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2021.102679
- Mahmoodi, A., Bahrami, B., Mehring, C. Reciprocity of social influence. Nature Communications. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-04925-y
- Hertz, U., Palminteri, S., Brunetti, S., Olesen, C., Frith, CD., Bahrami, B. Neural computations underpinning the strategic management of influence in advice giving. Nature Communications (2017)
- Mahmoodi, A., Bang, B., Olsen, K., Zhao, Y.A., Shi, Z., Broberg, K., Safavi, S., Han, S., Ahmadabadi, M.N., Chris, D.F., Roepstorff, A., Rees, G., and Bahrami, B. Equality bias impairs collective decision-making across cultures. PNAS (2015) 12, 3835–3840