Making decisions in a group: The Tradeoff

In class today we discussed some issues with problem solving and making decisions in a group. There are many problems associated with communicating in a group to come to a conclusion. One issue is amplification of errors, information cascades, social conformity, or issues like the hidden profile problem. The hidden profile problem is that everyone has common public information but some people have different private information that leads to a different opinion than the public information does. In the reading, Hidden Profiles, the information that the group shared pointed people in the wrong direction, however the information that all the people possessed individually could be put together to create the correct picture. So why didn't it?

One reason that the private information was not utilized to come up with the best solution was because it was overshadowed by the public information. The information that everyone in the group shared was constantly being reinforced by others in the group, while those who might disagree are not being reinforced, therefore are less likely to speak up. Status is also an issue. If one member of the group is seen as having a higher status, or of more importance, than people will tend to agree with them and conform to their ideas. Similarly, those with lesser status will be much more reticent to voice an opposing viewpoint. These influences help to create an information cascade. Information cascades occur because people do not share the private information that they have.

While trying to think of ways to negate this negative impact we came up with a few different ideas. In the experiment described in Hidden Profiles, one could imagine having the group members go around and agree to only say new information, and not repeat any facts. This would help negate the continuous reinforcement of the community information. This is harder to apply in real word applications. Another issue is that the first person to speak up in a group will have a proportionally larger influence than the speakers following them. This is because this person helps to set the tone and shape how the rest of the conversation will go. It was suggested that perhaps small groups could be formed to counteract this, because then there are many people initiating conversations, instead of just one. While this would be successful, it has the possible downside of group polarization. This is when groups of like minded people get together and speak and become even more extreme and set in their opinion. While this may help fuel a passionate debate between different sets of groups, it creates an issue of compromise. Do you want a passionate debate of many different ideas that is unlikely to settle on one opinion? Or is the goal of the group to come to one consensus.

Many marketing companies encourage members to be critical of every viewpoint brought to the table. They want you to challenge each other, to think outside the box, and view the situation from every possible angle. Sometimes it is encouraged to disagree just for arguments sake to avoid a convergence of though processes. Engineering also strongly encourages debate within ideas, and groups to challenge each other so that the most innovative solution can be brought forth.