The Effect of Collaborative Triadic Conversations in Noise on Decision-Making in a General-Knowledge Task.
Ingvi Örnolfsson, Axel Ahrens, Torsten Dau and 1 others
PMID 39668600WHAT IT FOUND
In loud background noise, group members were more likely to change their answers to match those of the most confident person.
Low-confidence individuals often stayed silent rather than challenging the confident majority, shifting the group's final decisions toward the loudest voice.
Key findings
01Participants were significantly more likely to switch to a partner's answer if they had lower initial confidence, and this tendency to defer to high-confidence opinions was stronger in loud noise.
02In loud noise, groups converged on a single answer more often than in soft noise, with odds ratios of 1.90 for pairs and 1.61 for groups.
03When the most confident person was in the minority, loud noise caused the group to follow that person's opinion (confidence slating) in 58.6% of cases, compared to an equal split in soft noise.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used only normal-hearing participants, so the direct impact of hearing impairment on these dynamics is inferred, not measured. The mechanism is speculative: authors suggest low-confidence individuals stayed silent due to effort, but they did not measure who spoke when. The task was artificial (general knowledge questions), which may not reflect the complexity of real-world social or clinical decision-making. Sample size was small (30 participants in 10 groups), limiting generalizability.
Declared interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. The work was supported by Meta Reality Labs.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that increased agreement in noise reflects better communication or consensus. The data shows that loud noise suppresses dissent from lower-confidence individuals, leading to a false sense of unity where one voice dominates.