Group decision making

Question 1

give an example of when the wisdom of crowds is seen in real life

Answer 1

meetings to make collective decisions such as a jury in a trial case > they discover the right course of action

Question 2

what defines small group decision making?

Answer 2

3-6 people completing short tasks usually face to face

Question 3

Hill (1982) says in group function there is evidence of both process ____ and process ____

Answer 3

loss, gain

Question 4

how accurately do groups perform?

Answer 4

most of the time at the accuracy of the second best member of the group (underperform to the strongest member of the group)

Question 5

what are the 4 factors that make comparing groups across different experiments hard?

Answer 5

task type, standards of comparison, coordination methods, individual differences

Question 6

what are the different task types?

Answer 6

intellective vs. judgement tasks, well-defined vs. ill-defined tasks (tasks that require insight? background knowledge? provoke strong intuitions/emotions/biases?)

Question 7

what is the difference between well-defined and ill-defined tasks?

Answer 7

well defined = something with a clear success metric, ill defined = no clear strategy of how to solve the task

Question 8

usually avoid testing tasks that require what?

Answer 8

background knowledge

Question 9

how you decide whether a group decision was good or bad =

Answer 9

standards of comparison

Question 10

where the collective group outcome lies higher than the performance of the best individual =

Answer 10

synergy

Question 11

what are the 4 coordination methods?

Answer 11

averaging, ‘Delphi’, dictator method, discussion

Question 12

no group process with no discussion just the average answer of each group member = ?

Answer 12

averaging

Question 13

get info from everyone and then adjust to average answer of the group = ?

Answer 13

Delphi (iterative)

Question 14

pick best individual to answer = ?

Answer 14

dictator method

Question 15

consensus, dialectic method with back and forth giving reasons between the group to persuade each other = ?

Answer 15

discussion

Question 16

how are individual differences seen in groups?

Answer 16

members have different sources of information, abilities and capacities

Question 17

who developed the ‘lens model of decision making’?

Answer 17

Gigone & Hastie

Question 18

what model looked at clues about the world to construct a representation and different member judgements are combined to lead to a group judgement?

Answer 18

lens model of decision making

Question 19

Snirzek & Henry proposed that consensus is met by doing what 2 things?

Answer 19

revision and weighting

Question 20

what someone else says changes your own judgement =

Answer 20

revision

Question 21

when does averaging work?

Answer 21

when independent estimates have uncorrelated errors, no systematic biases and no coordination between group members

Question 22

averaging is a phenomenon that works best when there is no group _______

Answer 22

coordination

Question 23

if each individual has ____ in their judgement but it isn’t correlated between individuals then it will average out and give a better estimate of the true value

Answer 23

noise

Question 24

what prevents errors from being uncorrelated?

Answer 24

when someone has a strong intuition (need to have noise spread around the true value)

Question 25

what things cause correlated errors?

Answer 25

limited info, individual bias, strong intuition, group conformity

Question 26

polarisation in group decision making where a group become obsessed with a single answer often defined by most influential members of group =

Answer 26

groupthink

Question 27

what causes groupthink to happen?

Answer 27

overconfidence, blindness to errors, conformity > lead to skewed decision making

Question 28

what are criticisms of groupthink?

Answer 28

not a distinct phenomenon? > may be a series of phenomenon, doesn’t happen > a lot more limited than textbooks say

Question 29

reason evolved to produce and evaluate arguments in groups not for individuals to solve problems = what type of account?

Answer 29

interactionist account

Question 30

what were the findings when the Wason selection task was conducted in small groups instead of individually?

Answer 30

individually 80% of people fail but 80% of groups get this right! (majority failure to majority success) > truth wins scenario

Question 31

what happens to good vs. bad arguments in groups?

Answer 31

good arguments survive and persuade compared to bad arguments that don’t get deployed in a group

Question 32

how do groups reason?

Answer 32

an exchange of arguments

Question 33

groups typically co-constructed a structure of arguments qualitatively more sophistical than that generated by most individuals. how was this assessed qualitatively?

Answer 33

looked at transcripts of group discussion to see how groups reason

Question 34

what can arguments change?

Answer 34

peoples problem representation (when a group construct an argument > individuals construct better reasoning > change representations > better outcomes in decision making collectively)

Question 35

what did Engel et als ‘reading the mind in the eyes’ study show?

Answer 35

significant correlation between collective intelligence and average ToM scores of group members (both online and offline)

Question 36

does individual IQ of group members predict collective group intelligence?

Answer 36

findings = not much > no relation (groups of smart people did not outperform groups of less smart people)

Question 37

how many ppts and groups in engel et al’s study?

Answer 37

272 ppts > 68 groups (online and offline)

Question 38

what statistical technique did engel et al use?

Answer 38

factor analysis (largest amount of variance was from a single factor)

Question 39

what are predictors of ‘group intelligence’?

Answer 39

average social sensitivity, amount of communication, distribution of communication

Question 40

which part of collective intelligence is the problem in groups?

Answer 40

the collective (coordination) part rather than the intelligence

Question 41

people with better _____ ______ were better able to overcome the problem of being a collective group so coordinated better as a group

Answer 41

social perceptiveness (this was shown in ToM tasks in ‘reading in eyes of the mind’ study)

Question 42

what acts as an antidote to bias in groups?

Answer 42

diversity (improve decision making processes by increasing the diversity in a group)

Question 43

what does diversity in a group provide?

Answer 43

more background knowledge, different personalities etc.