Social and Cognitive Processes in Group Decision Making

人们经常被要求对复杂的问题做出决定，并涉及潜在结果的不确定性。人们试图确保他们做出最好的决定的方法之一是与其他人讨论这些决定。许多正式的决策设置需要团体（例如，陪审团，公司董事会等）做出重要决策，以确保多人对手头的问题进行思考并达成共识。然而，最近的研究表明，在某些情况下，让群体而不是个人做决定可能会导致更有偏见或更不准确的决定和判断。对这些发现的解释是，小组成员对特定任务的看法不准确或不恰当。因此，团队成员倾向于在错误的决策上相互支持，而不是提供纠正的影响。本文提出的研究将试图进一步了解这种共同的虚假陈述是如何在群体中运作的，并将探索可能纠正此类虚假陈述的条件。通过操纵分享错误陈述的小组成员的数量，并为一些小组成员提供纠正错误陈述的培训，研究人员希望发现在哪些条件下，群体或个人决策者可以克服决策偏见，并利用他人提供的信息做出更好的决策。

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.