Task Frame in Individual and Collective Decision Making

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Small groups make important decisions in government, organizations, and education. Often the goal is to pool diverse information from group members and use it effectively in order to reach more informed decisions. The proposed work will examine the role of task framing in promoting more effective individual and collective decision-making. Many decision problems can be resolved by using heuristics or by applying systematic, analytical procedures. For example, one can evaluate prospective employees by judging their similarity to a prototypical "good" employee (heuristic frame). Conversely, one could use test scores, level of education, and GPA and other measures that are known to predict job performance (analytical frame). The proposed work examines the interplay of task framing at the individual and group level and its effects on decision-making.This work will also explore different ways of distributing access to information that may facilitate problem-solving styles in collective decision-making. Preliminary work has shown that people who anticipated working in a group and thought that they had more information than others performed better on reasoning tasks. This work further suggests that the improved performance was partly due to "more informed" individuals processing information more deeply and framing the task in a more analytical way. In a series of proposed laboratory studies, individuals and groups will complete social prediction tasks based on descriptive information about targets and base rate information that can be used to derive a prediction. The distributions of descriptive and base rate information among group members before discussions will be systematically varied. The descriptive information will be stereotypically associated with a prediction that is inconsistent with the derived base rate prediction. In addition to assessing the correspondence between base rates and individual and group predictions, the types of information mentioned during group discussions will be analyzed. The studies will examine the following ideas: 1) The mix of information (descriptive versus base rate) that is commonly known will affect how the prediction task is framed by individuals and subsequently by groups; 2) Task framing will determine how groups reach decisions: analytical frames will be promote information exchange and argumentation (problem solving) and heuristic frames will promote conformity and compromise; and 3) A critical number of members must import an analytical frame into a group for the group to adopt a problem solving approach. Information distributions that are expected to promote analytical frames are ones that result in a critical number of prospective group members having: 1) the necessary information to support an analytical solution and 2) a sense of being better informed than others (thus, promoting more effortful cognitive processing). This work will contribute to our understanding of the processes involved in decision-making and of strategies that could be used to enhance the performance of individuals and groups.