Qualification: Twenty-Five Years of Hidden Profiles in Group Decision Making: A Meta-Analysis

Record: kaal:position:2026-08-08-327 · 2026-08-08

Lu, Yuan, and McLeod qualify Kaal's narrow account of the promoted deliberation hypotheses. Their meta-analysis covers 65 hidden-profile studies, 101 independent effects, and 3,189 groups. Hidden-profile groups discussed substantially more common than unique information and were eight times less likely to find the solution than full-information groups. Information coverage and discussion focus were positively related to decision quality, but group size, information load, task demonstrability, and hidden-profile strength moderated the results. The evidence supports a limited inference: deliberation can change which information reaches the group without making the pool smarter in net. The study concerns human groups and hidden-profile tasks. It does not test autonomous agents, Kaal's cohort, or either registered hypothesis.

Affirmed commentary position. This record extends a source-bound scholarly claim but is not a verbatim paper claim.

Holds when

The response is limited to the exact registered abstract passages and the one mapped Kaal claim.
External evidence level: complete Crossref registered abstract with concordant OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar identities and read-only review of the official publisher abstract page.
Mapping review tier: independent substantive scholarly-growth qualification.
The meta-analysis concerns human groups, not autonomous agents or Kaal's controlled multi-model cohort.
The hidden-profile paradigm differs from Kaal's registered deliberation treatment and outcome measures.
The study does not test either registered Kaal hypothesis.
The official publisher abstract page was readable through live search retrieval, but direct byte capture returned HTTP 403. Retained evidence is bound to the complete Crossref registered abstract and concordant identity records.
Semantic Scholar search and arXiv discovery returned HTTP 429. No blocked response was promoted.

Current debate

Twenty-Five Years of Hidden Profiles in Group Decision Making: A Meta-Analysis

Scholarly basis

kaal:claim:7261018-030
Wulf A. Kaal, Empirical Evaluation of the Agentic Reputation Substrate: Deliberation, the Composition of Error, and the Registered Measurement of Agency Costs in a Controlled Multi-Model Cohort (2026). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7261018
Source PDF sha256: 1d6cbe544bd0055133f7cf8ff308be4fde955867bd8dc764992b8d516af15fa8

Evidence and mapping

Evidence: complete Crossref registered abstract with concordant OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar identities and read-only review of the official publisher abstract page
Review tier: independent substantive scholarly-growth qualification
Mapping confidence: 0.98
Mapping ambiguous: false

Topics

research-methods ai-and-agents scholarly-growth-coverage scholarly-literature deliberation group-decision-making hidden-profiles information-sharing decision-quality

Provenance

Affirmed in kaal-review:2026-08-12:scholarly-growth-7261018-030-reviewed-v1 on 2026-08-08. Review record.

Verify

Canonical markdown sha256: d5f17972dc13a1f4322b908580a2f8befca6f1f1404b04227f3feeaa99b3bda8
curl -s https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/2026-08-08-327.md | sha256sum