Haptic communication optimises joint decisions and affords implicit confidence sharing
This addresses the problem of improving group decision-making efficiency for applications like negotiation technologies, though it is incremental as it builds on prior work on explicit confidence communication.
The study tackled the problem of whether implicit haptic communication can enable optimal group decisions, finding that haptically coupled dyads solved a perceptual discrimination task more accurately than their best individual members and five times faster than dyads using explicit communication.
Group decisions can outperform the choices of the best individual group members. Previous research suggested that optimal group decisions require individuals to communicate explicitly (e.g., verbally) their confidence levels. Our study addresses the untested hypothesis that implicit communication using a sensorimotor channel -- haptic coupling -- may afford optimal group decisions, too. We report that haptically coupled dyads solve a perceptual discrimination task more accurately than their best individual members; and five times faster than dyads using explicit communication. Furthermore, our computational analyses indicate that the haptic channel affords implicit confidence sharing. We found that dyads take leadership over the choice and communicate their confidence in it by modulating both the timing and the force of their movements. Our findings may pave the way to negotiation technologies using fast sensorimotor communication to solve problems in groups.