Group decision making Flashcards
give an example of when the wisdom of crowds is seen in real life
meetings to make collective decisions such as a jury in a trial case > they discover the right course of action
what defines small group decision making?
3-6 people completing short tasks usually face to face
Hill (1982) says in group function there is evidence of both process ____ and process ____
loss, gain
how accurately do groups perform?
most of the time at the accuracy of the second best member of the group (underperform to the strongest member of the group)
what are the 4 factors that make comparing groups across different experiments hard?
task type, standards of comparison, coordination methods, individual differences
what are the different task types?
intellective vs. judgement tasks, well-defined vs. ill-defined tasks (tasks that require insight? background knowledge? provoke strong intuitions/emotions/biases?)
what is the difference between well-defined and ill-defined tasks?
well defined = something with a clear success metric, ill defined = no clear strategy of how to solve the task
usually avoid testing tasks that require what?
background knowledge
how you decide whether a group decision was good or bad =
standards of comparison
where the collective group outcome lies higher than the performance of the best individual =
synergy
what are the 4 coordination methods?
averaging, ‘Delphi’, dictator method, discussion
no group process with no discussion just the average answer of each group member = ?
averaging
get info from everyone and then adjust to average answer of the group = ?
Delphi (iterative)
pick best individual to answer = ?
dictator method
consensus, dialectic method with back and forth giving reasons between the group to persuade each other = ?
discussion
how are individual differences seen in groups?
members have different sources of information, abilities and capacities
who developed the ‘lens model of decision making’?
Gigone & Hastie
what model looked at clues about the world to construct a representation and different member judgements are combined to lead to a group judgement?
lens model of decision making
Snirzek & Henry proposed that consensus is met by doing what 2 things?
revision and weighting
what someone else says changes your own judgement =
revision
when does averaging work?
when independent estimates have uncorrelated errors, no systematic biases and no coordination between group members
averaging is a phenomenon that works best when there is no group _______
coordination
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
noise
what prevents errors from being uncorrelated?
when someone has a strong intuition (need to have noise spread around the true value)
what things cause correlated errors?
limited info, individual bias, strong intuition, group conformity
polarisation in group decision making where a group become obsessed with a single answer often defined by most influential members of group =
groupthink
what causes groupthink to happen?
overconfidence, blindness to errors, conformity > lead to skewed decision making
what are criticisms of groupthink?
not a distinct phenomenon? > may be a series of phenomenon, doesn’t happen > a lot more limited than textbooks say
reason evolved to produce and evaluate arguments in groups not for individuals to solve problems = what type of account?
interactionist account
what were the findings when the Wason selection task was conducted in small groups instead of individually?
individually 80% of people fail but 80% of groups get this right! (majority failure to majority success) > truth wins scenario
what happens to good vs. bad arguments in groups?
good arguments survive and persuade compared to bad arguments that don’t get deployed in a group
how do groups reason?
an exchange of arguments
groups typically co-constructed a structure of arguments qualitatively more sophistical than that generated by most individuals. how was this assessed qualitatively?
looked at transcripts of group discussion to see how groups reason
what can arguments change?
peoples problem representation (when a group construct an argument > individuals construct better reasoning > change representations > better outcomes in decision making collectively)
what did Engel et als ‘reading the mind in the eyes’ study show?
significant correlation between collective intelligence and average ToM scores of group members (both online and offline)
does individual IQ of group members predict collective group intelligence?
findings = not much > no relation (groups of smart people did not outperform groups of less smart people)
how many ppts and groups in engel et al’s study?
272 ppts > 68 groups (online and offline)
what statistical technique did engel et al use?
factor analysis (largest amount of variance was from a single factor)
what are predictors of ‘group intelligence’?
average social sensitivity, amount of communication, distribution of communication
which part of collective intelligence is the problem in groups?
the collective (coordination) part rather than the intelligence
people with better _____ ______ were better able to overcome the problem of being a collective group so coordinated better as a group
social perceptiveness (this was shown in ToM tasks in ‘reading in eyes of the mind’ study)
what acts as an antidote to bias in groups?
diversity (improve decision making processes by increasing the diversity in a group)
what does diversity in a group provide?
more background knowledge, different personalities etc.
