Social Situations and Group Decision Making

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Social Situations and Group Decision Making
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Main Idea

• People do not make decisions in a vacuum
• There are normally many individuals involved
• Primary question
• Does have a number of people involved hurt or
  help in making the proper decision?
• Answer It all depends

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Why Tiger Woods does better with a crowd, but I
do worse

• Social Facilitation Theory
• Simple, well-learned tasks
• Helped by onlookers
• Complex, unmastered skills
• Hindered by onlookers

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Who not to have in your group

• Social Loafing
• In a group, let someone else take up the slack
• Alternative explanation
• Brooks Mythical Man-Month (1975)
• Question
• Why a programmer in a garage create a great piece
  of software but Microsoft cannot?
• Why adding programmers makes the project take
  longer?
• Why?
• Meetings, meetings, meetings, or
• The M/S programmers must spend a great deal of
  time communicating with others

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The Classic of All Group BiasesGroupthink

• a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality
  testing, and moral judgment that results from
  in-group pressures
• Janis, 1982
• Classic examples
• Challenger Disasters
• Cuban Missile Crisis
• Partially explains why voters do not believe
  Yucca Mountain

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Group Biases

• Group Attribution Error
• Attributing actions of an individual to a group
• e.g., Bush speaks for the US
• Group-serving biases
• Good things happen because of what we do Bad
  things just happen
• Homogeneity Bias
• Thinking that the group is diverse when it is not
• Classic case everyone goes to college because
  everyone we meet has gone to college
• What is the city highest educated population (in
  ) and what is that ? What state has the lowest?

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Does a group make better decisions than an
individual?

• It depends
• Groups better than novice or average individuals
• BUT
• Experts better than both

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Which decision technique is best?

• Collective
• No cross-talking, just aggregate data
• Consensus
• Face-to-face discussions leading to one judgment
  agreed to by all
• Delphi
• Anonymously supplied information from group
  (today, GDSS)
• Dialectic
• Groups required to discuss potential biases
• Dictator
• Use the best individual decision in the group

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Ways to view groupsAllison

• Rational Monolith
• The organization is a rational whole that make
  uniformed judgments
• Standard Operating Procedures
• Groups do what they have always done
• Positional Decision Making
• Where you stand depends upon where you sit

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And finally, Decision Theory today

• Why do drug dealers still live with their Moms?
• What is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?
• From Freakonomics (2005) by Levitt Dubner