Achieving Consensus in Groups with Low Authoritarianism of Participants in Decision Making

Abstract

The complexity of formalizing negotiation procedures leads to the search for fundamentally new approaches to building mathematical models. The theoretical study of consensus makes it possible to analyze various situations encountered by social groups participating in the group decision-making process, leaving aside specific characteristics of the groups. In the article, we built a mathematical model for a group with low authoritarianism among participants based on modeling using Markov chains. The analysis of the model showed that as the leniency of the group members increases, the time to reach consensus increases exponentially, apparently due to the negotiators' lack of desire to take responsibility for the decision. The differences between the number of negotiations in groups of participants with low authoritarianism are greater as the size of the group is smaller. This indicates a lack of coordination in such groups in the absence of a desire to take responsibility for the decision-making. It was revealed that in a dyad of two absolutely lenient participants, consensus is unattainable. For a group with low authoritarianism among participants, psychological "traps" such as false consensus or groupthink are possible, which can sometimes lead to managerial decisions with serious consequences.

Keywords

• decision making
• false consensus
• groupthink
• social groups
• markov chains
• time to reach consensus