Corroborated knowledge

Corroborated knowledge is the level of corroboration the knowledge held by the participants have. We still do not have a good scale to measure it. But I’ll suggest that highly corroborated knowledge will be one that shows high agreement between experts, politicians deliberative citizens in group with high representativeness levels. The reason for that is that experts in the field of knowledge, works in the field and could find what is working and what is not, and thus corroborate their knowledge. Experts could be professional experts, academic experts, Politicians (in the field of legislation), and Government employees and leaders that works in the field relevant to the subject. We may assume that the more experienced the expert, the more her knowledge is corroborated, yet this is only vogue evaluation. We can then further assume that if experts, especially from unrelated groups, agree on subjects, then the knowledge is more corroborated.

If citizens have some experience relevant to the issue, their knowledge should also be taken into consideration. If citizens do not have knowledge in the issue, then their judgment may be severely lacking. People tend to have a lot of difficulties to judge in issues they do not have experience in. Usually we do not have such problems in deliberation, because citizens will prefer to deliberate about issues that do matter to them and do influence them, and therefore have some experience in the subject.

So if the group of experts and affected citizens agree upon the solution, then we may assume that the knowledge is corroborated. But we have to take cautious of groupthink. People that deliberate for some time tend to develop groupthink, in which consensus is reached due to several mechanisms that inhibit critical thinking.

To overcome groupthink, facilitators should introduce measures to ensure critical thinking. Another measure is to measure the amount of consent between groups that did not meet during deliberation, and their members are not from the same expert groups.