Assessing communication success in triads based on group decision-making outcomes

Group decision-making is a fundamental aspect of many communicative interactions. When investigating human communication, analyses of group decision-making offer the potential to quantitatively evaluate various criteria that are indicative of successful communication. This study investigated how background noise influenced group decision-making in triadic interactions. Ten triads of normal-hearing participants were recruited. Initially, each participant responded to a series of binary general knowledge questions and provided a confidence rating along with their response. Subsequently, the questions were discussed in groups of three in two distinct conditions; a high-intensity background noise condition (78 dB, referred to as the ‘noisy’ condition’) or a low-intensity condition (48dB, referred to as the ‘quiet’ condition). Finally, participants individually answered the same questions again. Three outcome measures – stay/switch behavior, decision convergence, and voting strategy - were employed to assess how participants modified their posterior decisions relative to their initial decisions. These measures collectively revealed an interaction between confidence and noise level. Confident members generally had a stronger influence on post-conversation decisions in the noisy condition compared to the quiet condition. This finding suggests that low-confidence members might be more inclined to withhold their opinions in noisy environments compared to their high-confidence peers. From a broader perspective, the results demonstrate the sensitivity of the group decision-making task and proposed outcome measures to adverse changes in the acoustic environment. This task paradigm could potentially serve as a means for obtaining an objective evaluation of hearing interventions based on high-level decision-making in interactive, face-to-face communication scenarios.