Social Sharedness, Shared Task Representations and Group Decision Making

小型决策小组解决组织和社会中许多最重要的问题。 这样的群体比任何一个人都能为手头的任务带来更多的资源。 也有相当数量的研究支持的上级决策能力的群体相比，个人。 然而，最近的研究表明，使群体成为上级决策者和问题解决者的过程，在某些情况下也会使他们误入歧途。 在许多情况下，群体比个体表现得更好，因为当一个正确或最佳的替代方案被提出时，群体有能力认识到替代方案的“正确性”。 我们最近的工作表明，一个组的能力，这样做取决于一个适当的任务表示共享的组成员。 在大多数情况下，小组成员共享适当的代表权。 然而，我们已经表明，在小组成员共享一个错误的任务表示的情况下，组往往比个人表现更差。 目前的建议中所包含的研究将试图进一步了解这种共享的任务表征如何影响群体决策。 此外，该研究将解决如何竞争共享表示-特别是表示在不同层次的一般性-影响群体决策的结果和过程。 研究的总体目标是展示如何使群体能够在存在适当的任务表征时使用它们，但要学习如何防止他们使用最初在群体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.