11 - Decision strategies and bad group decision-making: a group meeting experiment

Abstract

The previous chapters have dealt with the problem of bad decision-making in personal judgments and decisions about individual behavior. According to the results, there is a certain degree of possibility that bad decisions will be made in individual behavior, and decision-making that involves comprehensive evaluation, such as the additive type, is difficult because of the cognitive load. It was recommended to use a simple decision-making strategy such as lexicographic to narrow down the choices and then conduct a comprehensive evaluation as a way to avoid bad decisions. In addition, it was suggested that a decision strategy such as disjunctive was less likely to focus on the most important attributes and more likely to lead to poor decision-making. In this chapter, we mainly focused on decision-making strategies and examined the influence of decision-making strategies on the likelihood of making a bad group decision. As a preliminary survey, we conducted an interview survey to collect candidates for the alternatives to be presented in the experiment and a questionnaire survey to extract bad decisions from the answers obtained in the interview survey. Then, to examine the effect of decision strategies on the likelihood of making a bad group decision, an experiment was conducted in which the participants were asked to discuss in accordance with three types of decision strategies (weighted addtive, lexicographic, and disjunctive strategies). In this study, we focused on decision-making strategies as a factor in bad group decision-making, and the results suggest that decision-making strategies have little effect on the group’s adoption of bad options, unlike the results of individual decision-making. This suggests that the process of group decision-making is quite different from that of individual decision-making. However, this result may be due to the fact that the experimental manipulation of the group decision-making strategy is slightly different from the manipulation and instruction methods of the individual decision-making strategy.