# kaal:position:2026-08-08-327

**Affirmed position.** 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.

**Status.** affirmed  **Published.** 2026-08-08

**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: https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868311417243

**Extends.** kaal:claim:7261018-030: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/7261018-030

**Scholarly basis.** 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 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

**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 at https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/by-claim/7261018-030.html.

**Record type.** This is a dated commentary position that extends a scholarly corpus claim. It is not a verbatim claim extracted from the paper.

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of the position.