Improving the Accuracy of Group Judgment: A Process Intervention Combining Group Facilitation, Social Judgment Analysis, and Information Technology

Abstract

Interacting groups fail to make judgments as accurate as those of their most capable members due to problems associated with both interaction processes and cognitive processing. Group process techniques and decision analytic tools have been used with groups to combat these problems. While such techniques and tools do improve the quality of group judgment, they have not enabled groups to make judgments more accurate than those of their most capable members on tasks that evoke a great deal of systematic bias. A new intervention procedure that integrates group facilitation, social judgment analysis, and information technology was developed to overcome more fully the problems typically associated with interaction processes and cognitive processing. The intervention was evaluated by testing the hypothesis that groups using this new procedure can establish judgment policies for cognitive conflict tasks that are more accurate than the ones produced by any of their members. An experiment involving 16 four- and five-member groups was conducted to compare the accuracy of group judgments with the accuracy of the judgments of the most capable group member. A total of 96 participants (48 males and 48 females) completed the individual part of the task; 71 of these participants worked in groups. Results indicated that the process intervention enabled small, interacting groups to perform significantly better than their most capable members on two cognitive conflict tasks (p < .05). The findings suggest that Group Decision Support Systems that integrate facilitation, social judgment analysis, and information technology should be used to improve the accuracy of group judgment.