A framework of a computerized decision aid to improve group judgments

Utpal Bose

doi:10.34105/j.kmel.2009.01.014

Abstract

In organizations, groups of decision makers often meet to make judgments as a group on issues and tasks such as, hiring a person who best fits an open position. In such tasks called cognitive conflict tasks, where there is no conflict of interest, group members attempting to reach a common solution often differ on their perspectives to the problem. Cognitive conflicts have been studied in the context of Social Judgment Theory, which posits that persons or judges make a set of judgments about a set of events based on observation of a set of cues related to the events. Disagreement arises because the judges fail to understand each other’s judgment making policies. In order to reduce disagreement and move the group towards a group judgment policy that has the consensus of the group members and is applied consistently, a computerized decision aid is proposed that can be built around a Group Support System using cognitive mapping as a method of providing cognitive feedback and the Analytic Hierarchy Process to process the conflicting criteria and help an individual formulate a judgment policy, as well as aggregate the individual policies into a group judgment policy. It is argued that such as decision aid by supporting every decision maker in the group to effectively use information about the task so that they have a good understanding of the judgment policy they form, to communicate their evaluation policies accurately to other members, and by providing an iterative mechanism through which members can arrive at a compromise solution to the task, is expected to improve the quality of group judgments.

Highlights

Group decision making has been conceptualized as a social process which takes individual preferences and aggregates them into a single group preference, achieving consensus is not always easy
The judgment policy of every individual decision maker is represented as yij = k=1,m bikxjk where yij is the judgment of alternative proposal j by individual i who fully understands the implications of the policy, m is the number of cues identified in a consistent manner with the help of cognitive mapping, bik is the weight for individual i on cue k determined by the AHP method which accounts for the conflicting nature of cues, and xjk is the value of cue k obtained from direct measurements of alternative proposal j
Analysis of cognitive conflict tasks can be based on an approach to cognition and social interaction as explained in Social Judgment Theory

Summary

Introduction

Group decision making has been conceptualized as a social process which takes individual preferences and aggregates them into a single group preference, achieving consensus is not always easy. Every group member brings a set of beliefs and values that were formed from previous knowledge and experience These beliefs and values influence the processing of information by the member and may render the individual unable to process information consistently and to understand the positions taken and judgments made by other members about decision issues (Sherman et al 1998). This incapacity results in conflict, disagreement, and misunderstanding among group members, often leading to decisions that are of low quality, or even failure of the group to arrive at a consensus decision (Cook and Hammond 1982). We illustrate the proposed group decision making process with an example

Research Literature

Scheme of Group Judgment Making Process

Phase C – Construction of Individual Judgment Policies

Phase D – Construction of Group Judgment Policy

Conclusions