cog wk 11

Question 1

downsides of group descision making

Answer 1

• conformity
• authority
• Polarisation
• Groupthink

Question 2

Benefits of group descision making

Answer 2

• wisdom of the crowd
• improvised reasoning

Question 3

why is authority a problem in group decision making

evidence (don’t rlly need to remember)

Answer 3

Those in lower authority may be scared to raise concern to those in higher authority as they believe they should’ve already spotted it.

larger authority gradients lead to less communication from lower rank to higher

found that the biggest authority gradient between army helicopter officers in cockpit, the more likely there was to have an accident.

40% of junior co-pilots reported not relaying concerns about safety to senior pilots

led to development of crew resource management

Question 4

how is polarization an issue in group decisions

Answer 4

take indivs, take their attitude to risk. assume average would be group attitude. BUT when they start talking to each other, they become more extreme in their views.

Question 5

Groupthink as a problem for group decisions

Answer 5

cohesive groups striving for unanimity and avoiding conflict or criticism.
Exacerbated in homogenous teams, where members are, or become too similar.

e.g. space shuttle exploded but engineers raised the concern that it was too cold for a component. The managers ignored this concern

Question 6

Wisdom of the crowd

Answer 6

guess the weight of a cow. collect all p.p answers, the median value was within 1% of the true weight of the cow.

this is true with multiple prediction.

Question 7

by looking at medical diagnoses, what did a study find about similarity in wisdom of the crowd

Answer 7

groups of doctors with similar levels of diagnostic accuracy will outperform the best doctor in the group

Question 8

Surprisingly popular algorithm - wisdom of the crowds

Answer 8

in niche specialist knowledge, wisdom of crowd usually doesn’t hold.
BUT if ask
- what is your answer?
- what will most people answer?

look at predicted percent agreement with own answer.

if there is a very low percent, we discover that someone has niche specialist knowledge

Question 9

wisdom of the crowd (within)

study

Answer 9

asked random history question

2 conditions:

• reliable condition (just give another estimate)
• dialectical bootstrapping condition (- assume you were wrong - think of a few reasons this could be. - what do these considerations imply. - based on new perspective, make a new estimate)

Found
- no improvement in repeated
- significant improvement in dialectical. only 4%
- 7% increase in one other person.

Question 10

systematic errors in wisdom of the crowds

Answer 10

• eliminates random errors
• Not so good at systematic errors e.g .anchoring

Question 11

improved reasoning in group reasoning

Answer 11

p not q task.

in indiv task, 9% chose correct, 43 chose PQ.

in group task, 75% chose correct response.

groups of more than 2 tend to better than the best individual could’ve