Private Noise and Public Error in Collective Information Acquisition

Abstract

Collective information acquisition requires groups to combine personal evidence with social information while remaining coupled to the external state. Communication noise can affect this process, but the role of noise remains unclear. In an online experiment, 600 participants worked in four-person human groups estimating a room temperature across 25 rounds while receiving either faithful social information, comprehension noise in which each receiver saw independently perturbed social information, or production noise in which perturbations were stored before display and could be seen by multiple receivers. The thermometer cue was objectively veridical, but its reliability was subjectively uncertain and the unitless 50--250 room-temperature range created a task-induced conflict between displayed evidence and everyday temperature expectations. Production-noise groups spent more rounds tightly clustered around a wrong value than comprehension-noise groups (\(p=0.016\), group-level permutation). Production noise more often created a wrong common signal (\(p=0.025\), Fisher's exact test) and made that signal persist across more rounds (\(p=0.004\), permutation). Dynamic update models showed that production noise was not more harmful because people followed peers more strongly, but because the same peer influence acted on more correlated production-noise perturbations. Exploratory human analyses linked the mechanism to psychological patterns while a GPT-agent experiment clarified a boundary condition: GPT agents registered uncertainty through reduced confidence without reproducing human-scale production-noise vulnerability. Overall, noise did not simply degrade collective information acquisition. Comprehension noise could sometimes improve correction relative to the faithful control, whereas production noise could turn perturbations into common evidence and stabilize consensus on error.