Social and Cognitive Processes in Group Decision Making

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People are often asked to make decisions about issues that are complex and involve uncertainty in terms potential outcomes. One of the ways people attempt to insure that they make the best decision possible is to discuss such decisions with others. Many formal decision making settings require groups (e.g., juries, corporate boards, etc) to make important decisions to insure that multiple people have thought about and reached consensus on the issue at hand. However, recent research has shown that under certain circumstances, having groups, as opposed to individuals, make decisions can lead to more biased or less accurate decisions and judgments. The explanation for these findings is that the group members share an inaccurate or inappropriate perspective on the particular task. Thus, the group members tend to provide support for each other on incorrect decisions rather than providing a corrective influence. The research proposed here will attempt to further understand how such shared misrepresentations operate in groups and will also explore conditions that may correct such misrepresentations. By manipulating the number of group members who share the misrepresentation and by providing training to some group members to correct the misrepresentation, the investigators hope to discover the conditions under which group or individual decision makers can overcome decision biases and use information provided by others to make better decisions.