Individual - Group Comparison of Requests for and Use of Advice

本研究探讨了促使群体不充分利用建议的条件，并询问群体是否有时可能比个人不充分利用建议的程度更低。由于个人和群体决策者通常都有可用的建议，因此更好地了解他们何时最有可能利用这些建议，可以帮助我们理解为什么某些个人或群体似乎会做出好的决定，以及为什么以及何时他们可能会做出坏的决定。这项研究将有助于国民健康和美国的竞争力，因为它为促进个人和群体决策中有效使用建议的过程设计提供了信息，从而改善了个人结果和组织绩效。数十年的研究表明，在社会背景下做出的决策，在最终判断之前，许多人的意见都是综合的，往往比单独的个人做出的决定更好（Kerr& Tindale，2004; Larrick& Soll，2006; Larson，2010）。不幸的是，大多数人没有意识到将他人的建议整合到自己的判断中的好处（Bonaccio Dalal，2006），所以他们要么没有充分利用建议，要么完全忽略它。此外，不只是个别决策者没有充分利用咨询意见，决策团体也是如此。事实上，最近的一项研究发现，小型决策群体对外部建议的利用不足程度甚至超过了个人，而且，像个人一样，他们为此付出了准确性的代价（Minson和Mueller，2012）。本研究的重点是条件，促使团体未充分利用的意见，并询问是否有时团体可能未充分利用的意见，在较小的程度上比个人做的。群体成员通常在达成共识后对他们的决策非常有信心，但在达成共识之前，特别是当成员的个人决策偏好存在很大差异时，他们对自己的判断往往信心相对较低（Tindale，1989）。由于信心可能在决定对建议的开放性方面起着重要作用，我们预测，当成员最初持有不同的决策偏好时，群体将在达成共识之前更好地利用建议。在我们的第一项研究中，将在决策过程的各个阶段向个人和团体提供建议，以便更多地了解在决策过程中，团体和个人最有可能充分利用建议的时间。我们的第二项研究将在一个更生态有效的情况下探索这些相同的过程，决策者必须积极寻求建议，而不是自动提供给他们的建议。

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.