group decision making

Question 1

conformity

Answer 1

Asch, 1956
- publication on how people’s judgements could be infuenced by those around them - length of lines
- participants frequently answered wrong because other members of the group did so (confederates)

Question 2

authority

Answer 2

In 1977 KLM and Pan-Am jumbo jets collided on a runway in Tenerife
- an investigation found the engineer did not challenge the captain’s decision to proceed with take-off despite doubting the runway was clear

Alkov et al., 1992
- when officers of different rank occupied cockpits together accidents increased
- 40% of junior co-pilots reported not relaying concerns about safety to senior pilots

Question 3

polarisation

Answer 3

Stoner, 1961: ‘risky shift’
- groups consistently enforsed a riskier judgement than the average of the individuals

Myers & Kaplan, 1975: juries
- for both assessments of guilt and severity of punishment participants showed evidence of polarisation

Question 4

groupthink

Answer 4

Janis, 1982
- cohesive groups striving for unanimity and avaoiding conflict or criticism
- exacerbated in homogenous teams, where members are, or become too similar

loosely defined

Question 5

wisdom of the crowd

Answer 5

Galton, 1907
- attended West of England Fat Stock and Poultry exhibition, people pay 6p to enter
- entrants with best guesses on slaughtered animal weight win a prize
- the average estimate of weight turned out to be highly accurate

particular conditions to succeed or fail
- e.g., in medical estimates by doctors, average accuracy was better than individual where the doctors had similar levels of accuracy

does not overcome anchoring

Question 6

wisdom of the crowd - surprisingly popular

Answer 6

• Wisdom of the crowd can fail is when highly specialised or novel knowledge is required
• by asking people the answer to a question and then asking them whether other pople would answer in the same way it is possible to determine how popular an answer is expected to be
• the answer that exceeds its expected popularity will often be the correct answer

Question 7

wisdom of the crowd within

Answer 7

• could an individual make multiple estimates and average them to improve their individual performance
• answer seems to be yes
• judgements typically need to be independent of one another in order for the wisdom of the crowds effect to work
• because random errors tend to cancel eachother out
• people have to come up with (semi) independent estimates, one tactic is to space estimates in time
• increase in performance small

Question 8

dialectal bootstrapping

Answer 8

people argue with themselves and come up with a new estimate based on an alternative reasoning process

wisdom of the crowd within - improves results to a good margin of error

(2 people still better!)

Question 9

Sasaki & Pratt, 2011 study - decoy

Answer 9

show that individuals are reliably biased by the presence of a decoy option
- individuals were ants choosing a nest site
- prefer dark nest small entrance
- options: bright nest small entrance, dark nest big entrance
- torn 50/50, but when a decoy nest - similar to one option but worse - was introduced the ants chose the nest that dominated the decoy

when colonies of ants chose instead of individuals, no sign of the decoy effect
- collective decision making overcoming systematic bias

Question 10

improved group reasoning - moshman and geil, 1998

Answer 10

4 card selection task
- 9% of individuals got it right
- 75% of groups chose correctly

in cases where groups settled on the correct answer no members initially selected the right options

Question 11

improved reasoning - Laughlin et al. 2006

Answer 11

numbers to letters reasoning task
- decipher which letters map to whic hnumbers
- groups performed statistically significantly better than the best people in groups of that size could have been expected to have done on their own
- true for any group with more than 2 people up to groups of 5
- pairs not found to perform better than the best individual