Social Sharedness, Shared Task Representations and Group Decision Making

小型决策小组解决了组织和社会中许多最重要的问题。这样的团队带来的资源比任何一个人都多。也有相当多的研究支持群体的决策能力优于个人。然而，最近的研究表明，在某些情况下，使群体成为优秀决策者和问题解决者的同样过程，也会使他们误入歧途。在许多情况下，群体比个人表现得更好，因为当提出一个正确或最佳的选择时，群体有能力认识到选择的“正确性”。我们最近的工作表明，一个小组的能力取决于小组成员共享的适当的任务表征。在大多数情况下，组成员共享一个适当的表示。然而，我们已经表明，在小组成员共享错误任务表征的情况下，小组通常比个人表现得更差。当前提案中包含的研究将试图进一步理解这种共享任务表征如何影响群体决策。此外，本研究还将探讨竞争性共享表征（特别是不同普遍性水平的表征）如何影响群体决策结果和过程。本研究的总体目标是展示如何使小组在存在适当的任务表示时使用适当的任务表示，但要学习如何防止他们使用最初在小组成员之间共享的错误表示。

Small decision-making groups resolve many of the most important issues/questions in organizations and society. Such groups bring more resources than any single individual to the task at hand. There is also a fair amount of research support for the superior decision-making capabilities of groups as compared to individuals. However, recent work has shown that the same processes that make groups superior decision-makers and problem-solvers can under certain circumstances, lead them astray. Groups perform better than individuals in many situations because when a correct or optimal alternative is proposed, groups have the ability to recognize the "correctness" of the alternative. Our recent work has shown that a group's ability to do this depends on an appropriate task representation shared by the group members. In most situations, the group members share an appropriate representation. However, we have shown that in situations where group members share a faulty task representation, group often perform worse than individuals. The research contained in the current proposal will attempt to further our understanding of how such shared task representations affect group decision-making. In addition, the research will address how competing shared representations - specifically representations at different levels of generality - affect group decision outcomes and processes. The overarching goals of the research are show how to enable groups to use appropriate task representations when they exist, but to learn how to prevent them from using faulty representations that are initially shared among the group members.