Individual - Group Comparison of Requests for and Use of Advice

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This research examines the conditions that prompt groups to underutilize advice, and asks whether groups might sometimes underutilize advice to a lesser extent than individuals do. Because both individual and group decision makers often have advice available to them, gaining a better understanding of when they will be most likely to take advantage of that advice may help us understand why certain individuals or groups seem to make good decisions and why and when they might be prone to make bad ones. This research will contribute to national health and to US competitiveness to the extent it informs the design of processes that promote effective use of advice in individual and group decision making so as to improve individual outcomes and organizational performance.Decades of research have shown that decisions made in a social context, where many people's opinions are integrated before a final judgment is reached, tend to be better than decisions made by lone individuals (Kerr & Tindale, 2004; Larrick & Soll, 2006; Larson, 2010). Unfortunately, most people do not realize the benefits of integrating advice from others into their own judgments (Bonaccio & Dalal, 2006), and so they either underutilize advice or ignore it altogether. Further, it is not just individual decision makers that underutilize advice; decision-making groups do so as well. Indeed, one recent study found that small decision-making groups underutilized external advice to an even greater extent than individuals do, and, like individuals, they paid a price in accuracy for doing so (Minson and Mueller, 2012). The present research focuses on the conditions that prompt groups to underutilize advice, and asks whether groups might sometimes underutilize advice to a lesser extent than individuals do. Group members are typically very confident in their decisions right after they have reached a consensus, but beforehand, and especially when there is substantial diversity in their members' individual decision preferences, they are apt to have relatively low confidence in their judgments (Tindale, 1989). Because confidence likely plays an important role in determining openness to advice, we predict that groups will make much better use of advice prior to consensus when their members initially hold diverse decision preferences. In our first study, advice will be provided to both individuals and groups at various stages of the decision making process in order to learn more about when, during that process, groups and individuals are most likely to make good use of advice. Our second study will then explore these same processes in a more ecologically valid situation, where decision-makers must actively seek-out advice, rather than the advice being provided to them automatically.