Social Sharedness, Shared Task Representations and Group Decision Making

小型决策小组解决组织和社会中的许多最重要的问题。这样的团队为手头的任务带来的资源比任何一个人都多。与个人相比，群体的卓越决策能力也得到了相当多的研究支持。然而，最近的研究表明，在某些情况下，让群体成为更好的决策者和问题解决者的相同过程可能会将他们引向歧途。在许多情况下，群体比个人表现得更好，因为当一个正确或最优的选择被提出时，群体有能力识别这个选择的“正确性”。我们最近的工作表明，一个组的能力取决于组成员共享的适当的任务表征。在大多数情况下，组成员共享适当的代表。然而，我们已经证明，在组成员分享错误的任务表征的情况下，组的表现通常比个人差。当前提案中包含的研究将试图加深我们对这种分担任务表征如何影响群体决策的理解。此外，这项研究还将探讨相互竞争的共享表征--特别是不同概括性水平的表征--如何影响群体决策的结果和过程。这项研究的首要目标是展示如何使小组在存在的情况下使用适当的任务表征，但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征。

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.