Prioritizing Policy Objectives in Polarized Groups using Artificial Swarm Intelligence

Groups often struggle to reach decisions, especially when populations are strongly divided by conflicting views. Traditional methods for collective decision-making involve polling individuals and aggregating results. In recent years, a new method called Artificial Swarm Intelligence (ASI) has been developed that enables networked human groups to deliberate in real-time systems, moderated by artificial intelligence algorithms. While traditional voting methods aggregate input provided by isolated participants, Swarm-based methods enable participants to influence each other and converge on solutions together. In this study we compare the output of traditional methods such as Majority vote and Borda count to the Swarm method on a set of divisive policy issues. We find that the rankings generated using ASI and the Borda Count methods are often rated as significantly more satisfactory than those generated by the Majority vote system (p<0.05). This result held for both the population that generated the rankings (the “in-group”) and the population that did not (the “out-group”): the in-group ranked the Swarm prioritizations as 9.6% more satisfactory than the Majority prioritizations, while the out-group ranked the Swarm prioritizations as 6.5% more satisfactory than the Majority prioritizations. This effect also held even when the out-group was subject to a demographic sampling bias of 10% (i.e. the out-group was composed of 10% more Labour voters than the in-group). The Swarm method was the only method to be perceived as more satisfactory to the “out-group” than the voting group.