Sanhedrin

Sanhedrin used to get decisions by a process round-table, in which the wiser spoke last.

One of the ancient groups that used deliberation was the “Sanhedrin“. The Sanhedrin were organizations of judges that were active in the period of the second temple of Judea (from around the 2nd century BC till about 425 AC). Its name came from Greek, but they conducted their trials not as the ancient citizens of Athens conducted theirs. The Athenians used Galton's method for their trials by installing 201 to 1501 citizens who acted as judges. All the hundreds of citizens listen to both sides and then cast their votes. The Athenians, who probably had an intuition about Galton’s method to extract the crowd's wisdom, asked their judges not to consult each other to avoid biased verdicts, but in reality, the judges did consult each other and, therefore, advanced biased answers.

The Sanhedrin approached judgment by another course. They limited the number of judges to 3 in financial cases and 23 to 71 judges in capital cases. They applied the synthesis approach to produce their verdict. The convention was that after interrogating witnesses and seeing evidence, the most junior judge would start offering justifications for the verdict. After him, the next judge in age will continue until the oldest and wisest will conclude. This procedure could have given the elders more time to learn from the newcomers and conceptualize more elaborate answers. Then after listening to everybody, all the judges voted on the verdict. In this procedure, the newcomers could also have a chance to give fresh propositions and, therefore, give the group new insights.