Shared Respresentations and Group Decision-Making

委员会、焦点小组和自我管理的工作团队已经成为许多组织的固定装置。在我们的社会中，对小团体的依赖可以部分归因于一种普遍的信念，即团体比单独工作的个人表现更好。从研究团队和团队效能的角度来看，扩大到小型决策群体的权力尤其有趣。大量的研究文献支持这样一种观点，即群体表现往往优于个人表现，但最近的研究结果表明，在某些情况下，群体也会增加犯错的可能性。在我们的研究项目中，我们已经证明，对于一些决策任务，不正确的少数人可以影响正确的多数人，使他们倾向于不正确的选择（例如，廷代尔，史密斯，托马斯，菲尔金斯，谢菲，1996）。在使用共享任务表示的概念时，我们已经能够预测团队何时比单独工作的个人表现得更好或更差。通过提出的研究，我们将尝试将我们的发现推广到新的领域，定义共享表征（即文化，意识形态）的起源，以及这些表征如何在群体做出决定的各种背景下运作。我们的最终目标是设计出一种方法，可以减少共享表示的潜在偏见影响。

Committees, focus groups, and self managed work teams have become permanent fixtures in many organizations. Reliance upon small groups in our society can be attributed in part to the pervasive belief that groups outperform individuals working alone. The power extended to small, decision making groups is especially interesting when viewed in light of the research exploring group and team efficacy. An extensive research literature supports the notion that group performance is frequently superior to individual performance, but recent findings suggest that groups can also increase the likelihood of error under certain circumstances. In our program of research we have demonstrated that for some decision making tasks, incorrect minorities can sway correct majorities toward their preferred incorrect alternative (e.g., Tindale, Smith, Thomas, Filkins, Sheffey, 1996.) In using the notion of a shared task representation, we have been able to predict when groups will perform better or worse than individuals working alone. With the proposed research we will attempt to generalize our findings to new domains, define the origins of shared representations (i.e., culture, ideology) and how these representations operate in the various contexts in which groups make their decisions. Our ultimate aim is to devise ways with which we can reduce the potential biasing effects of shared representations.