Task Frame in Individual and Collective Decision Making

小团体在政府、组织和教育中做出重要决定。通常，目标是汇集来自小组成员的不同信息，并有效地使用它，以达成更明智的决策。拟议的工作将审查任务框架在促进更有效的个人和集体决策方面的作用。许多决策问题可以通过使用启发式或应用系统的分析程序来解决。例如，人们可以通过判断他们与典型的“好”员工的相似性来评估未来的员工（启发式框架）。相反，人们可以使用考试成绩、教育水平、GPA和其他已知的指标来预测工作表现（分析框架）。建议的工作检查任务框架的相互作用，在个人和群体层面及其对决策的影响。这项工作还将探索不同的信息传播途径，以促进集体决策中解决问题的方式。初步研究表明，预期在团队中工作并认为自己比其他人掌握更多信息的人在推理任务中表现得更好。这项研究进一步表明，提高的表现部分是由于“更知情”的个人更深入地处理信息，并以更分析的方式构建任务。在一系列拟议的实验室研究中，个人和群体将根据关于目标的描述性信息和可用于推导预测的基本比率信息完成社会预测任务。在讨论之前，小组成员之间的描述性和基本比率资料的分配将有系统地变化。描述性信息将与与派生的基本速率预测不一致的预测刻板地联系在一起。除了评估基本比率与个人和团体预测之间的对应关系外，还将分析小组讨论中提到的信息类型。这些研究将检验以下观点：1)众所周知的信息组合（描述性和基本比率）将影响个人和随后的群体如何构建预测任务；2)任务框架将决定群体如何达成决策：分析框架将促进信息交换和论证（解决问题），启发式框架将促进一致性和妥协；3)一定数量的成员必须将分析框架导入团队，以便团队采用解决问题的方法。期望促进分析框架的信息分布是导致临界数量的潜在小组成员拥有：1)支持分析解决方案的必要信息；2)比其他人更了解情况的感觉（因此，促进更努力的认知处理）。这项工作将有助于我们了解决策过程以及可用于提高个人和群体绩效的策略。

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.