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transcend these limitations. In the third part we
report some preliminary results obtained from a
first field test of the Deliberatorium with a com-
munity of more than 200 users.
In the conclusions we introduce and discuss
several research hypotheses we intend to test for
in next experiments about how on-line large scale
argumentation may improve collective delibera-
tion compared to other technologies, like wikies
and forums.
particular when they are very homogeneous
and when the issue is related to values and
social identity.
The following conditions, in contrast, seem to
help deliberating groups outperform even their
best members:
•
people believe that the issue has a correct,
demonstrable solution (e.g. for so-called
“eureka problems”, i.e. where a self-evident
superior solution exists)
suPPorting on-line
deliberAtion: Pros And Cons
oF Current internet
teChnologies
•
the correct solution enjoys a certain degree
of support by the group members before
deliberation starts (in the extreme case, at
least one of the group members knows the
right solution and is able to
persuade
the
other members).
In the design of a platform for large-scale collec-
tive deliberation, it is critical to design effective
countermeasures to limit the risk of group delib-
eration failures. In his book Infotopia, Sunstein
(2006) outlines several causes that can induce
deliberating groups to fail in making accurate,
truthful and reliable decisions as well as some
conditions under which group deliberation can
work. He points out that deliberating groups typi-
cally suffer from three major problems:
The deliberation failure causes outlined above
have been detected in experiments in which
groups were required to deliberate about an issue
and reach a collective decision. It is important
to remark that this huge literature, developed
mostly in the '80s and '90s, is largely concerned
with small scale, closed, physically co-located
groups of individuals involved in direct interac-
tion in typical social situations, such as political
and management committees, juries, assemblies,
focus groups, meetings, etc.
While there are reasons to believe that the
above problems could also appear in groups col-
laborating through the Internet, to our knowledge
no systematic evidence is available to assess the
extent to which those effects can be found in large-
scale on-line deliberation communities. However,
some evidence exists for on-line prediction mar-
kets. Participants to a prediction market bet on
the supposed best candidate and receive a money
prize if their bet is correct, or lose their money in
the opposite case. Prediction markets have proven
to be a reliable approach for harnessing collective
intelligence for such uses as predicting the win-
ners of political elections (University of IOWA
•
they do not elicit all the relevant information
that their members have because of social
pressure (low
information disclosure
);
•
they are subject to cascade effects: sequential
information propagation in the group may
produce errors amplification and premature
convergence (contributions that happen to
have been made early in the group delib-
eration process can have a disproportionate
impact on the final outcome, eclipsing more
accurate or useful contributions that came
later in the process);
•
they show a tendency toward group po-
larization: often deliberating groups may
assume a position on an issue which is even
more extreme than the average opinion, in
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