Abstract
Biodiversity management requires effective decision making at various stages. However decision making in the real world is complex, driven by multiple factors and involves a range of stakeholders. Understanding the factors that influence decision making is crucial to addressing the conflicts that arise in conservation. Decisions can be made either by individuals or by groups. This precise context has been studied extensively for several decades by behavioural economists, social psychologists and intelligence analysts. The observations from these disciplines can offer useful insights for biodiversity conservation. A systematic review on group versus individual decision making is currently lacking. This systematic review would enable us to synthesize the key insights from these disciplines for a range of scenarios useful for conservation. The review will document studies that have investigated differences between group and individual decision making. The focus will be on empirical studies; the comparators in this case are decisions made by individuals while the intervention is group decision making. Outcomes include level of bias in decision outcomes or group performance. The search terms will include various combinations of the words “group”, “individual” and “decision-making”. The searches will be conducted in major publication databases, google scholar and specialist databases. Articles will be screened at the title and abstract and full text level by two reviewers. After checking for internal validity, the articles will be synthesized into subsets of decision contexts in which decision making by groups and individuals have been compared. The review process, all extracted data, original studies identified in the systematic review process and inclusion and exclusion decisions will be freely available as Additional file 1 in the final review.
Highlights
Biodiversity management requires effective decision making at various stages
A key question in decision making is whether groups make better decisions than individuals [1,2,3]
Individual experts may be consulted on management decisions or policy issues whereas boards of directors may make decisions on conservation donations and local communities may use group-based decision making for natural resource management
Summary
Search strategy The search strings have been modified to ensure an optimum level of both sensitivity and specificity. Search terms The main objective of the review is to test differences between groups and individuals (comparator) in decision making (outcome). Some articles were found on decision making in non-human primates or other animals which could be eliminated using the “NOT” operator These studies will not be included in the review. Type of study studies that have empirically tested and quantified the differences between groups and individuals in a decision making context will be included. Data extraction strategy The final selected articles will be categorised based on the methodology used to test differences between groups and individuals. If adequate reliable data are available we will proceed towards a meta-analysis In such a scenario, both fixed effects and random effects models will be used to investigate the differences between groups and individuals within each procedure category (e.g., lottery game).
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