Investigating the Impact of Background Noise on Group Decision-Making Using an Individual-Weighted Voting Model

Abstract Conceptualizing and measuring communication success is crucial for evaluating hearing interventions, as many hearing-impaired individuals struggle in interactive communication settings. However, no established methods exist to directly assess communication success in the context of hearing impairment and intervention. This study introduces a new perspective on communication success, defining it as the effective exchange of information between interlocutors. Experiments were conducted with ten triads (N = 30) to examine the impact of loud background noise on decision-making using a general-knowledge decision-making task in triadic groups. Participants answered questions twice, both before and after group discussions, under noise conditions of 78 dB and 48 dB SPL. A group decision model was applied to quantify the relative influence of group members on each other’s post-discussion decisions, formalized as a set of model weights. Four statistics were used to summarize the results across groups: overall weight change, self-weighting, weight equality, and weight similarity. Results showed that background noise significantly altered the overall weight participants gave to each other’s prior decisions, but self-weighting, weight equality, and weight similarity were not affected by the noise condition. This methodology offers a new tool for assessing the communicative consequences of hearing loss, providing insights beyond traditional hearing tests.