Decision Making in Groups

1. Decision Making in Groups

2. Outline • Why make decisions in groups? • Activity • Information sharing in groups • Activity • Group polarization

3. Why Make Decisions in Groups? • 1) More knowledge, more ideas, better memories • 2) Evaluate opinions better, catch errors. • 3) Have standards for making decisions • Social decision schemes: • The process by which individual inputs are combined to yield a group decision • 4) Can hide from individual responsibility

4. Group Decision Making Exercise • Group Decision Making Activity • Crime on Sesame Street • Who dunnit?

5. Exercise Instructions • Instructions • INDIVIDUALLY read through the scenario and all of the evidence • INDIVIDUALLY make your decision as to who committed the crime • As a GROUP discuss the case and unanimously agree on who committed the crime

6. Are Group Decisions Always Good? • Of course not. • Why do groups sometimes fail?

7. Information Sharing Problems in Groups • Fail to pool unshared information effectively • Tendency to oversample shared information • This tendency is exacerbated in tasks without ‘correct’ decisions • Leaders can prompt members to revealed unshared information

8. INDIVIDUALLY, read the scenarios and check the solution you favor. As a GROUP, discuss the scenarios and reach an unanimous opinion on each of them. Group Decision Making Exercise

9. Examine your scores: 1. Calculate your score prior to the discussion by summing your odds and dividing by 3. 2. Calculate your group’s prediscussion average score. 3. Compute your group’s postdiscussion score. 4. Draw a diagram of your group indicating the location of each person, the group’s prediscussion score, and the discussion score along a continuum from risk to caution. Group Decision Making Exercise

10. Groups: Moderating or Polarizing? • Common belief: • Groups exert a moderating effect on their members • Groups more moderate decision makers than individuals • But then… • In the early 1960s researchers questioned this assumption

11. Risky Shift Research • Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire (CDQ) • 12 life-situation problems involving a central person with a choice between more or less risky courses of action. • The participant's task is to choose the lowest likelihood of success he or she would demand before recommending the risky alternative. • SS complete the CDQ alone, after discussing it with a group, and again alone

12. Risky Shift Research • Comparing individual responses to group responses: • SS generally advocated riskier decisions in groups! • This change carried over to later individual choices • This is the RISKY SHIFT

13. Risky Shift Research • Researchers found risky shifts on many attitudes, beliefs, values, judgements and perceptions. • Some researchers found a different kind of shift: • Shift toward caution • Risky shift is part of a larger process!

14. Group Polarization • Discussion leads to group polarization: • Judgments made after group discussion will be more extreme in the same direction as the average of individual judgments prior to discussion. • The direction of the polarization depends on the group members’ original viewpoints. • Thus, before we can predict how the discussion will polarize the group, we must know the initial opinions of the members.

15. Group Polarization Risky Shift Cautious Shift 1 5 9 Caution Risk 7 3 C & D A B E F

16. Why? • Why do we shift our judgments to match the position that our group initially values? • Two theoretical explanations: • Persuasive arguments theory • Social comparison theory

17. Persuasive Arguments Theory • After discussion, we can generate more arguments favoring the more valued alternative. • With the CDQ, arguments favoring risk rather than caution are more plentiful.

18. Social Comparison Theory • During group discussion people actively compare themselves with others • When they discover that some members of the group have stronger attitudes than they do, they begin endorsing more extreme positions.