Papers › Mitigating Biases in Collective Decision-Making: Enhancing Performance in the Face of Fake News

Mitigating Biases in Collective Decision-Making: Enhancing Performance in the Face of Fake News

11 Mar 2024arXiv:2403.08829archive 2025-07-28

Axel Abels, Elias Fernandez Domingos, Ann Nowé, Tom Lenaerts

Individual and social biases undermine the effectiveness of human advisers by inducing judgment errors which can disadvantage protected groups. In this paper, we study the influence these biases can have in the pervasive problem of fake news by evaluating human participants' capacity to identify false headlines. By focusing on headlines involving sensitive characteristics, we gather a comprehensive dataset to explore how human responses are shaped by their biases. Our analysis reveals recurring individual biases and their permeation into collective decisions. We show that demographic factors, headline categories, and the manner in which information is presented significantly influence errors in human judgment. We then use our collected data as a benchmark problem on which we evaluate the efficacy of adaptive aggregation algorithms. In addition to their improved accuracy, our results highlight the interactions between the emergence of collective intelligence and the mitigation of participant biases.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

axelabels/fakenews officialmentioned in paper report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Decision Making

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections