Group Judgment Research Articles

Prioritising Factors Influencing Service Quality at Durban University of Technology: AHP Approach

There have been numerous studies conducted on the evaluation of service quality at universities. However, there remains a deficiency on using a multi criteria decision making approach in determining factors to consider for the improvement of service quality at a university. The purpose of this paper is to report on the use of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) as a decision making tool in determining factors to consider for the improvement of service quality at a university. The study adopted a mixed method methodology and an action research approach was employed using a case at the Durban University of Technology. A purposive convenient sample of 30 participants was used.Data was collected via questionnaires and face-to-face interviews. The data was captured inthe software Expert Choice and the results were processed by taking the aggregated group judgements as the geometric mean of the individual comparisons. The findings reveal that organisational and educational issues are paramount to providing an effective service at tertiary institutions.

Injury and the orchestral environment: part II. Organisational culture, behavioural norms, and attitudes to injury.

The organisational culture, behavioural norms, and attitudes of a workplace have a profound influence on levels of injury and illness amongst its workers. While this is well established in Work Health and Safety literature, very little research has attempted to understand the influence of organisational culture on injury risk in the orchestral profession. To address this, the current study aimed to investigate the influence of organisational culture on injury outcomes for orchestral musicians. Using a qualitative case study methodology, in-depth semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 10 professional orchestral cellists (2 freelance and 8 fulltime members) from a single Australian orchestra. After initial data analysis, further interviews were undertaken with a set of 5 orchestral management staff as a means of data triangulation. All data were analysed using a themes-based "analysis of narrative" approach. The findings indicate that an orchestral culture exists in which musicians see injury as a sign of weakness, failure, and poor musicianship. Such negative perceptions of injury influence musicians to play through considerable levels of pain and continue performing with injuries. Because of perceived judgment from the orchestral group, musicians were found to conceal injuries from colleagues and management staff. Freelance musicians felt that disclosing injuries may lead to decreased work opportunities, and both full-time and casual musicians felt that "opening up" about injury may subject them to group judgment about their technique or musicianship. The study suggests education measures which may be effective at influencing individual behaviours and attitudes as well as cultural change initiatives which could lead to long-term positive health outcomes in the orchestral workplace.

Everything Is Permitted? People Intuitively Judge Immorality as Representative of Atheists

Scientific research yields inconsistent and contradictory evidence relating religion to moral judgments and outcomes, yet most people on earth nonetheless view belief in God (or gods) as central to morality, and many view atheists with suspicion and scorn. To evaluate intuitions regarding a causal link between religion and morality, this paper tested intuitive moral judgments of atheists and other groups. Across five experiments (N = 1,152), American participants intuitively judged a wide variety of immoral acts (e.g., serial murder, consensual incest, necrobestiality, cannibalism) as representative of atheists, but not of eleven other religious, ethnic, and cultural groups. Even atheist participants judged immoral acts as more representative of atheists than of other groups. These findings demonstrate a prevalent intuition that belief in God serves a necessary function in inhibiting immoral conduct, and may help explain persistent negative perceptions of atheists.

Group Decision Making with the Analytic Hierarchy Process in Benefit-Risk Assessment: A Tutorial

The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been increasingly applied as a technique for multi-criteria decision analysis in healthcare. The AHP can aid decision makers in selecting the most valuable technology for patients, while taking into account multiple, and even conflicting, decision criteria. This tutorial illustrates the procedural steps of the AHP in supporting group decision making about new healthcare technology, including (1) identifying the decision goal, decision criteria, and alternative healthcare technologies to compare, (2) structuring the decision criteria, (3) judging the value of the alternative technologies on each decision criterion, (4) judging the importance of the decision criteria, (5) calculating group judgments, (6) analyzing the inconsistency in judgments, (7) calculating the overall value of the technologies, and (8) conducting sensitivity analyses. The AHP is illustrated via a hypothetical example, adapted from an empirical AHP analysis on the benefits and risks of tissue regeneration to repair small cartilage lesions in the knee.

An Approach to Group Making Problems Based on Two-Tuple Linguistic Theory

The group decision-making is a new way recent years in the world which is based on the analysis of linguistic information.A method for this kind of group problems based on two-tuple linguistic theory is proposed in this paper.First,the method transforms initial linguistic information into group judgement matrix,and then give the select process of optimal alternative based on an operator.Finally,a numerical example is given to illustrate the validity of the proposed method.

The Effects of Group Diversity on Miscalibration in Confidence Judgments (WITHDRAWN)

This paper explores the effects of group diversity on under- and overconfidence in group judgments. Participants in a laboratory experiment were assigned to groups of three and answered a number of...

Do High Working Memory Groups Perform Better?

A growing body of research shows that individual differences in working memory capacity play a pivotal role for a large number of higher order cognitive tasks. Surprisingly, however, the impact of individual differences in working memory capacity on group performance has received little attention. In this conceptual article, we focus on three typical group tasks (group idea generation, group decision making, group judgment) and, for each task, provide an analysis of how individual differences in working memory capacity might affect group performance. Our key idea is that group interaction is a cognitively demanding task as group members have to continuously monitor the ongoing conversation, hold their ideas in memory, integrate the information put forth by others, and update their mental representations accordingly. Therefore, individual differences in working memory capacity are presumed to have a profound impact on how people process information during group interaction.

Effects of Communication Between Judges on Consensus and Accuracy in Judgments of People’s Intelligence

We investigated how consensus and accuracy in judgments of people’s intelligence are affected by different procedures for obtaining group judgments. Watching videos of previously unacquainted targets reading a brief text, 65 triads of 3 judges judged the intelligence of 54 targets. The targets’ actual intelligence was assessed via tests of verbal and nonverbal cognitive abilities. In Condition 1, each triad member judged each target’s intelligence independently, and then the individual judgments were averaged. In Condition 2, two members of a triad revealed their judgments, and the third member then heralded the group’s judgment. In Condition 3, the judges discussed their impressions with one another, and then jointly announced a judgment they had agreed upon. Judgments became less accurate over time across conditions (fatigue effect), and more favorable in Condition 3. Communication between judges resulted in higher consensus, and judges assumed that discussion-based judgments were more accurate. However, accuracy did not really differ systematically between conditions. We discuss the implications of these results for applied contexts.

Group Judgments: Deliberation, Statistical Means, and Information Markets

How can groups elicit and aggregate the information held by their individual members? The most obvious answer involves deliberation. For two reasons, however, deliberating groups often fail to make good decisions. First, the statements and acts of some group members convey relevant information, and that information often leads other people not to disclose what they know. Second, social pressures, imposed by some group members, often lead other group members to silence themselves because of fear of disapproval and associated harms. The unfortunate results include the propagation of errors; hidden profiles; cascade effects; and group polarization. A variety of steps should be taken to ensure that deliberating groups obtain the information held by their members. Because of their ability to aggregate privately held information, information markets substantial advantages over group deliberation. These points bear on discussion of normative issues, in which deliberation might also fail to improve group thinking.

Common Brain Regions with Distinct Patterns of Neural Responses during Mentalizing about Groups and Individuals

An individual has a mind; a group does not. Yet humans routinely endow groups with mental states irreducible to any of their members (e.g., "scientists hope to understand every aspect of nature"). But are these mental states categorically similar to those we attribute to individuals? In two fMRI experiments, we tested this question against a set of brain regions that are consistently associated with social cognition--medial pFC, anterior temporal lobe, TPJ, and medial parietal cortex. Participants alternately answered questions about the mental states and physical attributes of individual people and groups. Regions previously associated with mentalizing about individuals were also robustly responsive to judgments of groups, suggesting that perceivers deploy the same social-cognitive processes when thinking about the mind of an individual and the "mind" of a group. However, multivariate searchlight analysis revealed that several of these regions showed distinct multivoxel patterns of response to groups and individual people, suggesting that perceivers maintain distinct representations of groups and individuals during mental state inferences. These findings suggest that perceivers mentalize about groups in a manner qualitatively similar to mentalizing about individual people, but that the brain nevertheless maintains important distinctions between the representations of such entities.

Assurance on Environmental Performance and Investor Judgments: The Impact of Environmental Attitudes

This study extends prior research by investigating and finding that nonprofessional investors’ attitudes regarding environmental sustainability affect their views on the relative importance of environmental versus financial performance and whether environmental performance affects firm investment returns. It also investigates how these views moderate the influence of environmental performance and assurance information on investor judgments. Environmental performance has a positive effect on the investment desirability and amount judgments of nonprofessional investors who find environmental performance relatively more important, and assurance has a positive effect on the investment desirability judgments of this same group of investors. However, neither environmental performance nor assurance affects the investment judgments of nonprofessional investors who believe that environmentally responsible companies yield higher returns. The results suggest that investors’ environmental attitudes are important in influencing the effects of environmental performance information on investment judgments.

Group personality judgments at zero acquaintance: Communication among judges versus aggregation of independent evaluations

The current study (N=264) compared the validity of personality judgments made by groups of 2, 3, or 4 people to the validity of personality judgments from 2, 3, or 4 aggregated individual reports. I replicated the general increase in validity that accompanies the aggregation of independent judgments. However, group judgments did not follow this pattern. Small groups outperformed the average single rater, but increasing group size did not lead to similar increases in validity. In short, two heads are better than one across both judgment scenarios, but the point of diminishing returns on additional group members occurs more quickly when judgments are made interactively.

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Book Reviews

Altered representation of facial expressions after early visual deprivation

We investigated the effects of early visual deprivation on the underlying representation of the six basic emotions. Using multi-dimensional scaling (MDS), we compared the similarity judgments of adults who had missed early visual input because of bilateral congenital cataracts to control adults with normal vision. Participants made similarity judgments of the six basic emotional expressions, plus neutral, at three different intensities. Consistent with previous studies, the similarity judgments of typical adults could be modeled with four underlying dimensions, which can be interpreted as representing pleasure, arousal, potency and intensity of expressions. As a group, cataract-reversal patients showed a systematic structure with dimensions representing pleasure, potency, and intensity. However, an arousal dimension was not obvious in the patient group's judgments. Hierarchical clustering analysis revealed a pattern in patients seen in typical 7-year-olds but not typical 14-year-olds or adults. There was also more variability among the patients than among the controls, as evidenced by higher stress values for the MDS fit to the patients' data and more dispersed weightings on the four dimensions. The findings suggest an important role for early visual experience in shaping the later development of the representations of emotions. Since the normal underlying structure for emotion emerges postnatally and continues to be refined until late childhood, the altered representation of emotion in adult patients suggests a sleeper effect.

Ranking strategic and operative goals for sustainable development of Pohorje, Slovenia

The combination of participatory process and multi-criteria decision methods have proven to be effective in supporting forest management decisions, since it offers inclusion of different opinions, views, and preferences of the problem. Our study is based on the results of the NATREG project, which deals with management of Pohorje, a mountain area in Slovenia. The results define six strategic goals and appertaining operative goals, which are the outcomes of workshops with different stakeholders. The aim of our study is ranking the strategic goals according to their contribution in the implementation of the "Pohorje 2030" vision and of the operative goals according to the appertaining strategic goals. Analytic hierarchy process is applied for comparisons of goals. Geometric mean method is employed for aggregating individual judgments into group judgment. The results show that all strategic goals are important, although most attention should be devoted to the goals "Preserved cultural heritage and local tradition" and "Environmental and consumer friendly usage of natural resources".

Optimal Weight Determination and Consensus Formation under Fuzzy Linguistic Environment

This paper deals with the consensus problem from the linguistic preference relations. The linguistic variables are transformed into triangular fuzzy numbers. Then an optimal consensus model is proposed to derive weights for fuzzy triangular fuzzy preference relations. An iterative algorithm is presented to describe the consensus reaching process. By changing the weights and modifying a pair of individual's comparison judgments which have largest deviation value to the group judgments, the consensus reaching process can terminate while both individual consensus index (ICI) and group consensus index (GCI) are controlled with predefined thresholds. The algorithm aims to preserve the decision-makers’ original information as much as possible. Finally, an example is given to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Applying Formal Social Epistemology to the Real World

Abstract The claim that diversity and independence have a net positive epistemic effect on the judgments of groups has been recently defended formally by Scott Page, among others, and popularized in Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. In Meta-Induction and the Wisdom of Crowds Thorn and Schurz take issue with the claim that more diversity and independence in groups leads to better collective judgments. I argue that Thorn and Schurz's arguments are helpful in clarifying a number of over-generalizations about diversity and independence that are often circulated in the social epistemology literature. I also argue that the relevant formal arguments are easily misunderstood when presented 'in a vacuum', that is, without a context of application in mind. I provide a different approach to understanding formal results in social epistemology: With the help of concrete scenarios and the formal literature, I focus on a trade-off between independence and dependence in groups. I show that the approach works well also for another principle in social epistemology; namely, the principle that 'more heads are better than few'.

Network selection based on multiple attribute decision making and group decision making for heterogeneous wireless networks

One of the key issues for radio resources management is network selection strategy in heterogeneous scenarios. In order to provide ubiquitous service, the paper puts forward a network selection algorithm based on multiple attribute decision making (MADM) and group decision making (GDM). Firstly, the proposed algorithm acquires attribute weights' vectors of the subjective and objective decision makers based on MADM, and then the two attribute weights' vectors are synthesized to be a new attribute weights' vector by using GDM. Considering that the results of GDM should be reasonable and convincible, the criterion of consistency is adopted for judging the compatibility of group judgments. More specifically, the algorithm takes into account not only objective attributes of networks but also the preference of subscribers and traffic class. Hence it guarantees that the subscribers can not select the networks with poor performance depending on their preference. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the handoff number and provide subscribers with satisfactory quality of service (QoS).

Why groups perform better than individuals at quantitative judgment tasks: Group-to-individual transfer as an alternative to differential weighting

One prominent finding in research on group judgment is that groups often outperform the average of their members’ individual judgments. Previous research attributed this finding to groups weighting their more competent members more strongly (differential weighting explanation). We postulate an alternative explanation, namely that groups outperform individuals due to group-to-individual (G–I) transfer, which denotes group members becoming more accurate individually during group interaction. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that individual accuracy in an estimation task strongly increases due to interaction, leading to high accuracy at the group level. Experiment 2 replicates this finding and shows that G–I transfer can be enhanced by expertise feedback. In both experiments, when controlling for G–I transfer during group interaction, group judgments were not better than the average model. The findings imply that previously observed superior performance by groups compared to individuals may have been due to G–I transfer and not necessarily due to differential weighting.

Evaluation of new service concepts using rough set theory and group analytic hierarchy process

One of the most crucial stages in the new service development (NSD) process is concept selection, which is characterized by newly generated alternatives and vaguely defined concept evaluation criteria. Although a number of factors have been found to be influential, a lacuna remains as to how to make a strategic decision based on influential factors. This study proposes a systematic approach to evaluation of new service concepts (NSCs) by integrating the merit of group analytic hierarchy process (AHP) in modeling multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problems and the strength of rough set theory (RST) in handling subjectivity in concept evaluation. The suggested approach is designed to be executed in four discrete stages. First of all, a hierarchical AHP model for the evaluation of NSCs is constructed in terms of strategy, finance, market, technology, and implementation. Second, pairwise comparisons are made among criteria and sub-criteria, and preferences to NSCs with respect to the sub-criteria are obtained by domain experts. Third, the individual judgments obtained at the preceding stage are aggregated into group judgments. Finally, the NSCs are prioritized based on risk propensity of decision makers. A case study of the video game service is presented to illustrate the suggested approach. We believe that our method can promote consensus building on the promising NSCs.