Lecture 9 - group cognition

madness of crowds

-stock market activity and economic bubbles

-investors buy cheap shares and this snowballs increasing the price of shares until they no longer reflect the value of the company

wisdom of crowds

-individuals asked to guess weight of an ox

-guesses made individually but the mean of the guesses was very close to the actual weight of the ox

small group decision making

-typical paradigm to test group cognition:

• 3-6 people

• short tasks

• common aims

decision tasks

-individuals more likely to get answer wrong

-in groups can discuss and see improvement in cognition

wasons selection task

-four cards all have letter on one side and number on other side: E, X, 1, 6

-rule is all cards with a vowel on one side have an even number on the other side

-75% get wrong when doing it alone → not difficult and most understand it when explained to them

-in a group 75% get it right → talk through options, argue case and reason

confirmation bias

-preference for seeking information that can only confirm existing beliefs, rather than contradict it

-about active search for information, not just whether you believe information when you encounter it

wason selection task in groups

-can be used as small group decision task

-75% groups arrive at correct answer, complete opposite for individual level

-few minutes of discussion can change the wrong answer to correct response

-allows researchers to look at the process of reasoning in groups

wason task controls

-things which don’t help:

• motivation/reward

• changing the wording

• university education

-things that help:

• making the task less abstract

• working within a group

wason selection task - social rule version

-making it less abstract but same rules

-people perform better on this

-group cognition can improve on individual reasoning

process loss (groups vs individuals)

-group decisions are worse than individual

process gain (groups vs individuals)

-group decisions are better than individual

groups vs individuals

-most of the time groups performed at the accuracy of second best member of the group

-group cognition tends to avoid the individual worst answer but also the best answer

difficulty comparing groups

-need to define four factors

1. task type

2. standards of comparison

3. coordination methods

4. individual differences

task types (difficulty comparing groups)

-intellective tasks vs judgement tasks

-well-defined vs ill-defined

-does the task depend on insight, background knowledge or intuition?

individual vs group task type (difficulty comparing groups)

-given time and discussion groups perform as well as best individual on intellective tasks

-best members outperform groups in judgements tasks

-when the task does not have a clear answer, then groups tend to perform at the level of the average members

standard of comparison (difficulty comparing groups)

-how well we do within groups and how groups compare to individuals

-synergy → performing at higher level than the capacity of individuals within the group

coordination methods (difficulty comparing groups)

-refers to how the group functions

-no discussion → averaging individual’s answers

-iterative, anonymous, answers, no discussion → delphi method revises answers to reach consensus

-discussion group chooses the best individual to answer → dictator method

-discussion and come to group agreement → consensus method

-discussion with revision, given collective mean, discuss and revise → dialectic methods

evidence for different coordination methods (difficulty comparing groups)

1. best improvement with dictator group

2. delphi method

3. dialectic method

4. least improvement was consensus group

-none outperformed the best individual members

individual differences (difficulty comparing groups)

-sources of information

-ability

-other capacities e.g., willingness to coordinate

achieving group consensus

-consensus is achieved through revision and weighting

-revision occurs within the individual

-weighting (combination of multiple judgements) occurs within the group

lens model of group decision making and consensus

-revision at an individual level and weighting at a group level

-C = environment containing the to be judged element/criteria

-O = judgements and revised judgements

-accuracy of group decision making relies on accuracy of individual judgements - weighting towards individuals and information can affect accuracy of the group judgement

-group judgements that are highly related to the criteria in the environment then this would be an accurate decision

-can be influenced by systematic bias or persuasive individuals

when averaging works

-uncorrelated errors → independent estimates

-no systematic biases

-no coordination between group members

uncorrelated errors

-most people guess around middle

-so group estimate averages out to be near true value (if true value near middle)

correlated errors

-there is bias within space so shift in answers

-still have an average but this has shifted due to systematic bias and not near true value

-due to:

• limited information

• shared biases

• group conformity

influences on group cognition

1. groupthink

2. diversity

groupthink

-attitudes in group move from average of individuals to more polarised extreme position

-highly cohesive groups exhibit premature consensus seeking that leads to poor decision making

• overconfidence

• blindness to errors

• conformity

criticisms of groupthink

-not a distinct phenomenon

-hasn’t added anything to literature of group reasoning

-lack of empirical evidence for all of the constructs

-focus on when group decisions have led to negative outcomes → restricts the understanding of group decision making process

diversity

-antidote to bias

-more diverse teams produce better outcomes

-e.g., diverse wikipedia editing teams produce better articles and spend longer in complex discussion

interactionist account (social accounts of reason)

-reason evolved to produce and evaluate arguments

-not for individuals to solve problems

argumentative theory of reasoning

-exchange of arguments is key to better reasoning

-confirmation bias is an individual failing but in a group is a collective strength

how groups reason

-exchange arguments → groups typically co-constructed a structure of arguments qualitatively more sophisticated than that from individuals

-arguments change people’s problem representation

collective intelligence

-ability of a group to perform a wide variety of tasks

woolley (collective intelligence)

-general ability of a particular group to perform well across a wide range of different tasks

-people who do well on one task tend to do well on most others

general intelligence

-collective intelligence is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members

-collective intelligence is correlated with:

• average social sensitivity of group members

• equality in distribution of conversation turn-taking

• proportion of women in the group

• diversity within the group

• cognitive diversity

engel - method (collective intelligence)

-68 groups online and offline - 34 groups in each condition

-ToM task → measure of social cognition and ability

-intelligence task → sudoku conducted online or face-to-face

-raven’s advanced progressive matrices test

-generating task → intelligence task

engel - results (collective intelligence)

-one factor accounting for most variance seen across different tasks seen as collective intelligence

-online and offline RMET scores predicted average → social sensitivity is important to group functioning

predictors of group intelligence

-average social sensitivity

-amount of communication

-distribution of communication

-strongly suggests the coordination problem of group work often overweighs the intellectual challenges