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Downsides of group decision making
Conformity and social pressure can influence judgments in group decision making, as evidenced by Asch's experiment in 1956.
What is the important finding related to social pressure in group decision making?
The pressure to conform to the majority view can be a powerful force in group decision making.
What is the nuance in Asch's interpretation of his findings?
The same data can also be interpreted as evidence of people's independence.
What is the important factor in group decision making related to authority?
Poor communication due to the need for authoritative figures.
What was the disaster in Tenerife that led to widespread changes in aviation?
The collision of two 747s on the runway resulting in the deaths of 583 people.
What were some contributing factors to the Tenerife accident?
Fog, improper communication between the control tower and the cockpits, and unpreparedness for the high volume of planes.
Communication Failure in Aviation
The KLM flight highlighted a failure in communication between the flight engineer and the captain, leading to a tragic accident. Unwillingness to challenge authority and the phenomenon of risky shift were identified as contributing factors.
Crew Resource Management
A protocol used in modern aviation to train flight crews to challenge senior colleagues and train senior pilots to recognize when they are being challenged and respond appropriately.
Risky Shift
The phenomenon where groups endorse a riskier view than individual members would endorse on average by themselves. Also known as group polarization.
Polarization
The phenomenon where groups tend to endorse a more extreme view than the average of its members' views. This can be important in jury decision making.
What did Myers and Kaplan's 1975 research examine?
Myers and Kaplan's 1975 research examined jury decision-making.
What methodology did Myers and Kaplan use in their research?
Myers and Kaplan asked people to consider eight traffic felony cases taken from the California law review. They used highly incriminating and not very incriminating cases and asked participants to judge guilt and state the punishment they would endorse.
What did participants do in Myers and Kaplan's research?
Participants judged the defendants' guilt on a scale from 1 to 4 first as individuals, then discussed four of the cases in groups, and finally rated all the cases again. They also stated the punishment they would endorse on a scale from 1 to 7, assuming the defendant were found guilty.
What evidence did participants show in their assessments of guilt and severity of punishment?
Participants showed evidence of polarization, where their ratings of guilt or innocence and severity of punishment became more extreme after discussing the cases in groups.
What was observed when participants discussed cases as a group?
When participants discussed cases as a group, their subsequent ratings of guilt or innocence became more extreme, as did their severity of punishment ratings.
What are the possible mechanisms behind polarization?
The mechanisms behind polarization are unclear, but it is suggested that people may be more tentative when making judgments alone. When they find that most people in a group agree with them, they become more confident in their initial judgment and endorse a slightly more extreme view than they started with.
Is polarization a desirable phenomenon?
Polarization does not seem like a particularly desirable phenomenon, especially in the context of important group decisions such as those made by juries.
What should polarization be understood in the context of?
Polarization should be understood in the context of important group decisions such as those made by juries and many others.
Groupthink
The term 'groupthink' was coined by Irving Janis in 1981 and refers to a problem that can occur in groups that are too homogenous. Members become reluctant to criticize and defend the consensus view from outside critique, leading to disastrous decision making.
Challenger Space Shuttle
The launch of the Challenger space shuttle, which exploded shortly after launch, is often attributed to groupthink. NASA managers failed to take onboard a recommendation from engineers about the low temperature being unsafe for launch.
Wisdom of the Crowds
The concept of 'wisdom of the crowds' refers to the phenomenon whereby the average estimate of a group of people is highly accurate and often better than any of the individual estimates. It is a condition under which group decision making can improve the accuracy of judgments.
Galton's Research
Francis Galton's research at the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition demonstrated the concept of 'wisdom of the crowds' when entrants' estimates for the weight of an ox, when averaged, came very close to the actual weight.
Wisdom of the Crowd Conditions
Research into 'wisdom of the crowd' has revealed particular conditions under which it is likely to succeed or fail. Understanding these conditions is important for improving group decision making.
Conditions for success or failure in crowd decision-making
Factors influencing group accuracy in decision-making situations, such as variability of individual accuracy, conferencing, and specialized/novel knowledge.
Kurver et al 2016
Found that the average accuracy of a group of doctors in classifying mammograms is better than that of any individual doctor, depending on variability of individual accuracy.
Lorenz et al 2011
Discovered that allowing participants to confer can harm the wisdom of the crowd effect as people allow themselves to be influenced by others' estimates.
Surprisingly Popular Algorithm
Demonstrated by Prelec et al 2017 that by asking people for an answer and then asking them whether others would give the same answer, the expected popularity of an answer can be determined, leading to correct judgments in surprising questions.
Wisdom of the Crowd
A phenomenon where the average of many people's estimates can be close to the true value, leading to improved decision-making and problem-solving.
Surprisingly Popular Algorithm
An algorithm that outperformed other wisdom of the crowds approaches on various judgment types, including state capitals, the value of pieces of art, and the diagnosis of skin lesions.
Independence of Judgments
The principle that judgments need to be independent of one another for the wisdom of the crowds effect to work, as random errors tend to cancel each other out.
Wisdom of the crowd
The concept that the collective opinion of a group of individuals is often more accurate than that of a single expert.
Semi-independent estimates
Estimates produced by individuals that are somewhat independent of each other, reducing the influence of bias and error.
Dialectical bootstrapping
The process of engaging in self-argumentation to develop a new estimate based on alternative reasoning processes.
Reliability condition
An experimental condition in which participants are encouraged to provide another estimate without being encouraged to alter their reasoning, often with the promise of a prize for the most accurate estimate.
Gains in accuracy
Improvements in the accuracy of estimates, often measured in terms of reduced errors or increased precision.
Anchoring
A cognitive bias in decision-making where individuals rely heavily on the first piece of information encountered (the "anchor") when making subsequent judgments.
Wisdom of the crowds
The concept that the average estimate of a group of independent individuals is more accurate than that of any single member of the group.
Anchoring
The cognitive bias where individuals rely too heavily on the first piece of information encountered (the anchor) when making decisions.
Anchoring experiments
Experiments where individuals are asked to make independent estimates of a quantity, and the introduction of an anchor affects their estimates.
Systematic errors
Consistent and repeatable errors that result from biases or flaws in thinking, leading to predictable inaccuracies in judgment.
Attraction effect
The phenomenon where the presence of a third decoy option influences individual decision-making, leading to a preference for one option over another.
Ants' Decision Making
Ants were torn approximately 50-50 between a bright nest with a small entrance and a dark nest with a big entrance. When a decoy nest was introduced, the ants reliably chose the nest that dominated the decoy. However, when colonies of ants made the same choices, there was no sign of the decoy effect, indicating collective decision making overcoming individual bias.
Ants' Attraction Effect
Ants showed a common decision bias known as the attraction effect. Individual ants chose nest site A when A dominated decoy D_a and chose nest site B when B dominated decoy D_b.
Explanation for Ants' Behavior
One plausible explanation for the ants' behavior is that individual ants had to make a comparison between all available choices. In contrast, when the colony as a whole made a choice, an individual ant would only be responsible for relaying information about one potential nest site, leading to the colony outperforming individuals on these decision formats.
Ants vs. Humans in Decision Making
Ant colonies outperformed humans on decision formats such as expected value, suggesting that ants have rational approaches to decision making that enable them to outperform humans in certain contexts.
Improved Reasoning in Groups
In reasoning tasks, groups often outperform individuals and even the best individual in a group. In an experiment, nearly 75% of groups chose the correct answer to the Wason card selection task, while only 9% of individuals got it right.
Performance improvement in groups
Moshman and Geil observed that in several cases where the groups settled on the correct answer, none of the members initially selected the P and not Q cards, implying that collective reasoning really does improve people's performance relative to what they could achieve individually.
Numbers to letters task study
Laughlin et al. (2006) conducted a study using the numbers to letters reasoning task, where participants had to decipher which letters A to J map onto which numbers 0 to 9. Groups were found to perform statistically significantly better than the best individuals in groups of that size could be expected to have done on their own.
Measures of performance
Performance was measured by the number of trials taken to identify all the mappings (fewer trials indicative of better performance) and the number of letters in the proposed equations (more letters generally indicate superior reasoning ability), and groups outperformed individuals on both measures.
Downsides of group decision making
Tendency to conform to the majority view even when that view is self-evidently wrong, and the effect of authority when team members are unwilling to challenge those of higher rank even when the consequences of not doing so are potentially harmful.
11 life threatening Polarisation
Groups often arrive at more extreme judgements than the average judgment of their members.
Groupthink
A term used to describe poor decision making by homogenous groups that insulate themselves from criticism.
Wisdom of the crowds
By cancelling out random errors, the average of many people's estimates can be close to the true value.
Systematic errors
Wisdom of the crowds can't cancel out systematic errors.
Collective decision making in ants
Sometimes corrects for individual biases.
Factors for benefits of group decision making
Diversity and independence of judgment.
Factors for downsides of group decision making
Stifled diversity and independence (conformity, authority, groupthink).
Scholarly Assistant's Insights
Flashcard deck introducing topics like group decision-making downsides, Polarization, Wisdom of the Crowds, and more!
Group Decision Making
Aviation Accidents
Communication Failure
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Risky Shift
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