Can anonymity add to the quality of debate?

When engaging people on an information market the goal is to get them to speak up and retrieve the information sitting with them. This is what enables effective “information aggregation” – when all the players are contributing with their private information: information that only they have access to.

This is not the norm. In a face-to-face meeting, you would watch out what your peers and superiors would say to what you say, so being the social animals we are, we watch out for inappropriateness. While being a good thing in general, this lowers the quality if a debate, as explained in Sunstein’s Infotopia.

As an example of how group pressures bias decision-making, consider a group of 5 choosing between a and b. Assuming preferences are lined up symmetrically, studies show that starting with the group that defends a versus b is more likely to win. This is due to biased perception of the norms of the group after the first person showed his/her preference. A reflection in politics is the right to descend – that can be meaningfully exercised when people can hide their actual preferences to avoid any personal pressures. Hence, elections are conducted the way they are.

On the other hand, social media flourishes because people know one another and can link to one another in a million ways. Social connectivity and appreciation drive us to Facebook so very frequently.

If we are to govern ourselves online, should we (or not) have our identities disclosed?