How to improve group decision making

When it operates efficiently, a group's decision making will nearly always outperform the ability of any one of its members working on their own. This is especially the case if the group is formed of diverse members. One problem: groups rarely work efficiently.

A new meta-analysis (pdf) of 72 studies, involving 4,795 groups and over 17,000 individuals has shown that groups tend to spend most of their time discussing the information shared by members, which is therefore redundant, rather than discussing information known only to one or a minority of members. This is important because those groups that do share unique information tend to make better decisions.

Another important factor is how much group members talk to each other. Ironically, Jessica Mesmer-Magnus and Leslie DeChurch found that groups that talked more tended to share less unique information.

"What this suggests is that teams who talk more amongst themselves aren’t necessarily sharing useful information. Therefore, they’re not actually coming to a better result. Rather, it’s more important what the teams are talking about, than how much they are talking," said Mesmer-Magnus.

Groups were also found to perform better when they engaged in so-called "intellective tasks" - that is, when they attempted to solve a problem where a correct answer exists, rather than seeking a consensus opinion or judgment.

Another important factor was discussion structure. Groups particularly benefited from sharing unique information when they employed a highly structured, more focused method of discussion.

"Teams typically possess an informational advantage over individuals, enabling diverse personal experiences, cultural viewpoints, areas of specialization, and educational backgrounds to bring forth a rich pool of information on which to base decision alternatives and relevant criteria," the researchers concluded. "However, the current findings confirm that although sharing information is important to team outcomes, teams fail to share information when they most need to do so."

Link to related Digest items, such as "forget brainstorming, try brainwriting".
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Mesmer-Magnus, J., & DeChurch, L. (2009). Information sharing and team performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94 (2), 535-546 DOI: 10.1037/a0013773

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Adults still challenged by Piagetian task

Jean Piaget, the celebrated Swiss psychologist who founded "genetic epistemology" - the study of how knowledge develops - believed that children's understanding of the world advances in discrete stages. Central to his theory was the idea that the stage a child is at can be revealed by the mistakes they make on key tasks. Now Gaelle Leroux and colleagues have scanned the brains of adults performing one of these tasks, and they've argued their results reveal evidence of child-like thinking in the adult brain.

The task they used is the so-called "conservation of number" task. Present a child younger than seven with two rows of items (buttons, for example) and ask them to say whether the two rows contain an equal number of items or not. You'll probably find that they base their answer on the length of the rows, regardless of the actual number of items in each row. The error reveals the child's use of an inappropriate "length=number" strategy.

When Leroux's team asked nine men to perform this task, they took longer to answer when the longer row wasn't necessarily the row with most items, compared with an easier condition, in which row length and number of items always matched. Moreover, the more difficult condition, involving length-number mismatches, was associated with increased activity in a swathe of brain areas compared with the easier condition. These regions included frontal regions such as the middle frontal gyrus and anterior cingulate cortex, which are known to be involved in inhibitory control.

The researchers said their findings show that the adults were having to inhibit a child-like tendency to follow the erroneous "length=number" strategy. They also noted that these frontal brain areas involved in inhibitory control are known to develop later in childhood than other areas which are associated with more basic functions. "These developmental findings support the idea of a crucial role of executive frontal areas in solving a task like Piaget's," they said, "as they mature precisely during a period when children become able to inhibit the perceptual bias - age 7."
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Gaëlle Leroux, Jeanne Spiess, Laure Zago, Sandrine Rossi, Amélie Lubin, Marie-Renée Turbelin, Bernard Mazoyer, Nathalie Tzourio-Mazoyer, Olivier Houdé, Marc Joliot (2009). Adult brains don't fully overcome biases that lead to incorrect performance during cognitive development: an fMRI study in young adults completing a Piaget-like task. Developmental Science, 12 (2), 326-338 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00785.x

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