Hidden Profile Task Research Articles

A Conceptualization of Mood Influences on Group Judgment and Decision Making: The Key Function of Dominant Cognitive Processing Strategies

This conceptualization describes how positive and negative mood states, information processing, cognitive processing strategies, and group interaction combine to influence group judgment and decision making. The crux of the conceptualization is a dominant cognitive processing strategy. Positive moods inform group members that the situation is benign and reinforce dominant cognitive processing strategies. Negative moods provide feedback that the situation is problematic, leading to inhibition or revision of dominant cognitive processing strategies. Moods achieve these impacts through their influences on the cognitive processes of attention, processing objectives, and cognitive representations. Group interaction also accentuates these cognitive processes and related strategies. This conceptualization is applied to understand mood influences on jury decision making, group social dilemmas, hidden profile tasks, group judgments of opinions, judgments with cognitive biases, and quantitative judgments. The discussion considers mood influences in other group judgment and decision making related phenomena of group brainstorming, intergroup negotiation, stress, and groupthink.

Self- and observer ratings of team reflection: A mixed methods approach

The extent to which self- and observer ratings of team reflection are related and whether the different data sources can explain incremental variance in team performance improvement has not yet been examined. We therefore studied teams working on a hidden profile task. Team reflection was measured using self-reports and audio data. Self- and observer ratings did not correlate with each other but simultaneously predicted team performance improvement. In contrast to self-ratings, observer-rated quality positively predicted performance improvement independent of controlling for observer-rated quantity. Conclusively, both data sources appear to be diagnostically valuable and should be considered when examining team reflection.

When Majority Men Respect Minority Women, Groups Communicate Better: A Neurological Exploration

Groups must leverage their members’ diverse knowledge to make optimal decisions. However, the gender composition of a group may affect this ability, particularly because solo status female members (one female grouped with males) are generally allocated lower status than their male counterparts, so their knowledge is more likely to be ignored. Whereas most previous work suggests ways solo status women can increase their status; instead, we propose that groups communicate better when men give their female teammate appropriate respect. We examine this in mixed-gender groups working on a hidden profile task while wearing wireless EEGs to measure live neural activity. We find that groups who solve the problem correctly are more likely to contain majority male members with more approach-oriented mindsets, operationalized as neural alpha asymmetry, as they respect their female teammate more. Thus, we provide evidence that neural activity is partially responsible for whether mixed-gender groups make optimal decisions.

A variational-autoencoder approach to solve the hidden profile task in hybrid human-machine teams.

Algorithmic agents, popularly known as bots, have been accused of spreading misinformation online and supporting fringe views. Collectives are vulnerable to hidden-profile environments, where task-relevant information is unevenly distributed across individuals. To do well in this task, information aggregation must equally weigh minority and majority views against simple but inefficient majority-based decisions. In an experimental design, human volunteers working in teams of 10 were asked to solve a hidden-profile prediction task. We trained a variational auto-encoder (VAE) to learn people’s hidden information distribution by observing how people’s judgments correlated over time. A bot was designed to sample responses from the VAE latent embedding to selectively support opinions proportionally to their under-representation in the team. We show that the presence of a single bot (representing 10% of team members) can significantly increase the polarization between minority and majority opinions by making minority opinions less prone to social influence. Although the effects on hybrid team performance were small, the bot presence significantly influenced opinion dynamics and individual accuracy. These findings show that self-supervized machine learning techniques can be used to design algorithms that can sway opinion dynamics and group outcomes.

Automating Discovery of Dominance in Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication

With the advent of electronic interaction, dominance (or the assertion of control over others) has acquired new dimensions. This study investigates the dynamics and characteristics of dominance in virtual interaction by analyzing electronic chat transcripts of groups solving a hidden profile task. We investigate computer-mediated communication behavior patterns that demonstrate dominance and identify a number of relevant variables. These indicators are calculated with automatic and manual coding of text transcripts. A comparison of both sets of variables indicates that automatic text analysis methods yield similar conclusions than manual coding. These findings are encouraging to advance research in text analysis methods in general, and in the study of virtual team dominance in particular.

Equal Performance, Different Grade: Women's Performance in Discussion Perceived Worse Than Men's.

We investigate how men and women are evaluated in group discussions. In five studies (N = 761) using a variant of a Hidden Profile Task, we find that, when experimentally and/or statistically controlling for actual gender differences in behavior, the female performance in a group discussion is devalued in comparison to male performance. This was observed for fellow group members (Study 1) and outside observers (Studies 2-5), in both primarily student (Studies 1, 4, and 5) and mixed samples (Studies 2 and 3), for different measures of performance (perceived helpfulness of the contribution, for work-related competence), across different discussion formats (preformulated chat messages, open chat), and when controlling for the number of female group members (Study 5). In contrast to our hypothesis, we did not find a moderating effect of selection procedure in that women were devalued to a similar degree in both situations with a women's quota and without.

Quality of group decisions by board members: a hidden-profile experiment

PurposeReaching decisions in a deliberative manner is of utmost importance for boards, as their decision-making impacts entire organisations. The current study aims to investigate (1) the quality of group decisions made by board members, (2) their confidence in, satisfaction with, and reflection on the decision-making, and (3) the effect of two discussion procedures on objective decision quality and subjective evaluations of the decision-making.Design/methodology/approachBoard members of various Dutch non-profit organisations (N = 141) participated in a group decision-making task and a brief questionnaire. According to the hidden-profile paradigm, information was asymmetrically distributed among group members and should have been pooled to reach the objectively best decision. Half of the groups received one of two discussion procedures (i.e. advocacy decision or decisional balance sheet), while the other half received none.FindingsOnly a fifth of the groups successfully chose the best decision alternative. The initial majority preference strongly influenced the decision, which indicates that discussion was irrelevant to the outcome. Nevertheless, board members were satisfied with their decision-making. Using a discussion procedure enhanced participants' perception that they adequately weighed the pros and cons, but did not improve objective decision quality or other aspects of the subjective evaluation. These findings suggest that board members are unaware of their biased decision-making, which might hinder improvement.Originality/valueRather than using student samples, this study was the first to have board members participating in a hidden-profile task.

The Effect of Perceived Competence and Competitive Environment on Team Decision-Making in the Hidden-Profile Paradigm

Complex decision-making in organizations is a process frequently assigned to teams. An expected benefit of utilizing teams is that, due to an expanded pool of available information, outcomes may be superior to those of an individual decision-maker. However, research using the Hidden-Profile Paradigm (i.e., a research design where each team member has information that must be shared to arrive at an accurate solution) has consistently shown that team members regularly fail to exploit their unique information to produce accurate decisions. This failure may be due to a combination of social, individual, and contextual factors, information processing inaccuracies, and cognitive biases. The current study sought to determine whether individuals’ perception of competence relative to other team members influences information sharing and decision accuracy in hidden-profiles. Further, the interactive effects of competitive versus cooperative environmental factors were examined. Two-person teams were assembled to solve a hidden-profile task. Team members were led to believe that they were either more or less competent than their team-mate, and instructed to either cooperate or compete with one another. Results indicated that teams comprising individuals who perceived themselves as relatively less competent shared more information; however, decision accuracy was found to be better only under a cooperative environment. In addition, intention to strategically withhold information from one’s team-mate was found to be higher for teams under a competitive environment. The study has implications for hidden-profile research and for team decision-making in organizations.

Mental simulation and the individual preference effect

PurposeThe “Individual Preference Effect” (IPE: Faulmüller et al., 2010; Greitemeyer and Schulz-Hardt, 2003; Greitemeyer et al., 2003), a form of confirmation bias, is an important barrier to achieving improved group decision-making outcomes in hidden profile tasks. Group members remain committed to their individual preferences and are unable to disconfirm their initial suboptimal selection decisions, even when presented with full information enabling them to correct them, and even if the accompanying group processes are perfectly conducted. This paper examines whether a mental simulation can overcome the IPE.Design/methodology/approachTwo experimental studies examine the effect of a mental simulation intervention in attenuating the IPE and improving decision quality in an online individual hidden profile task.FindingsIndividuals undertaking a mental simulation achieved higher decision quality than those in a control condition and experienced a greater reduction in confidence in the suboptimal solution.Research limitations/implicationsResults suggest a role for mental simulation in overcoming the IPE. The test environment is an online individual decision-making task, and broader application to group decision-making is not tested.Practical implicationsSince mental simulation is something we all do, it should easily generalise to an organisational setting to improve decision outcomes.Originality/valueTo the authors' knowledge, no study has examined whether mental simulation can attenuate the IPE.

Towards Successful Knowledge Integration in Online Collaboration

Successful knowledge integration, that is, systematic synthesis of unshared information, is key to suc-cess, but at the same time a challenging venture for teams with distributed knowledge collaborating online. For example, teams with heterogeneous knowledge often have only vague or even wrong ideas about who knows what. This situation is further complicated if the collaboration partners do not know each other and merely communicate online. Previous research has found meta-knowledge, that is, knowledge about one's own and the partner's knowledge areas, to be a promising but not yet sufficient-ly investigated approach to promote knowledge integration. With our experimental study we aimed to address this desideratum of research on the role of meta-knowledge in net-based collaborations. We "simulated" a chat-based collaboration between partners with heterogeneous knowledge by assigning specific information to students collaborating in dyads on a Hidden Profile task. To arrive at the correct joint solution for this task, collaborating partners had to pool their shared, but more importantly their unshared information. We compared two conditions: In the experimental condition meta-knowledge was promoted by providing the collaboration partners with self-presentations of each other's roles, which pointed to their unique fields of knowledge, while participants in the control condition did not receive this information. Results suggest a positive impact of the meta-knowledge manipulation on two key factors of collaboration: knowledge integration and construction of a transactive memory system (TMS).

The Impact of Group Size on the Discovery of Hidden Profiles in Online Discussion Groups

Online discussions help individuals to gather knowledge and make important decisions in diverse areas from health and finance to computing and data science. Online discussion groups exhibit unique group dynamics not found in traditional small groups, such as staggered participation and asynchronous communication, and the effects of these features on knowledge sharing is not well understood. In this article, we focus on one such aspect: wide variation in group size. Using a controlled experiment with a hidden profile task, we evaluate online discussion groups’ capacity to share distributed knowledge when group size ranges from 4 to 32 participants. We found that individuals in medium-sized discussions performed the best, and we suggest that this represents a tradeoff in which larger groups tend to share more facts, but have more difficulty than smaller groups at resolving misunderstandings.

What if my colleague was wrong and I was right? The impact of counterfactual mindsets and interpersonal focus on written communication and decision making in a hidden profile task

Past research on counterfactual mindsets (CFMs) has mainly focused on how those influence dealing with own information, without addressing the potential impact of CFMs on responses to others' information. Thus, this study examined how CFMs combined with an interpersonal focus influence responses to others' statements in a decision making context. Results reveal that a CFM combined with an interpersonal focus leads to more biased communication in response to others' information, thereby reinforcing own preferences. No such effect was observed in an intrapersonal focus or a control condition. A congruency between induction and application context thus seems to make the application of CFMs more likely. We discuss our findings in relation to previous work on counterfactual thinking and the mindset literature in general.

Distributed Knowledge in Crowds: Crowd Performance on Hidden Profile Tasks

Individuals today discuss information and form judgements as crowds in online communities and platforms. "Wisdom of the crowd" arguments suggest that, in theory, crowds have the capacity to bring together diverse expertise, pooling distributed knowledge and thereby solving challenging and complex problems. This paper concerns one way that crowds might fall short of this ideal. A large body of research in the social psychology of small groups concerns the shared information bias, a tendency for group members to focus on common knowledge at the expense of rarer information which only one or a few individuals might possess. We investigated whether this well-known bias for small groups also impacts larger crowds of 30 participants working on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We found that crowds failed to adequately pool distributed facts; that they were partially biased in how they shared facts; and that individual perception of group decisions was unstable. Nonetheless, we found that aggregating individual reports from the crowd resulted in moderate performance in solving the assigned task.

Metacognitive Myopia in Hidden-Profile Tasks: The Failure to Control for Repetition Biases.

The failure to exploit collective wisdom is evident in the conspicuous difficulty to solve hidden-profile tasks. While previous accounts focus on group-dynamics and motivational biases, the present research applies a metacognitive perspective to an ordinary learning approach. Assuming that evaluative learning is sensitive to the frequency with which targets are paired with positive versus negative attributes, selective repetition of targets’ assets and deficits will inevitably bias the resulting evaluations. As selective repetition effects are ubiquitous, metacognitive monitoring and control functions are required to correct for repetition biases. However, three experiments show that metacognitive myopia prevents judges from correction, even when explicitly warned to ignore selective repetition (Experiment 1), when same-speaker repetitions rule out social validation (Experiment 2) and when blatant debriefing enforces superficial corrections (Experiment 3). For a comprehensive understanding of collective judgments and decisions, it is essential to take metacognitive monitoring and control into account.

The effect of prediscussion note‐taking in hidden profile tasks

Prior research has discovered that groups tend to discuss shared information while failing to discuss unique information in decision‐making processes. In our study, we conducted a lab experiment to examine the effect of prediscussion note‐taking on this phenomenon. The experiment used a murder‐mystery hidden profile task. In all, 192 undergraduate students were recruited and randomly assigned into 48 four‐person groups with gender being the matching variable (i.e., each group consisted of four same‐gender participants). During the decision‐making processes, some groups were asked to take notes while reading task materials and had their notes available in the following group discussion, while the other groups were not given this opportunity. Our analysis results suggest that (a) the presence of an information piece in group members' notes positively correlates with its appearance in the subsequent discussion and note‐taking positively affects the group's information repetition rate; (b) group decision quality positively correlates with the group's information sampling rate and negatively correlates with the group's information sampling/repetition bias; and (c) gender has no statistically significant moderating effect on the relationship between note‐taking and information sharing. These results imply that prediscussion note‐taking could facilitate information sharing but could not alleviate the biased information pooling in hidden profile tasks.

Manipulating a synchronous or separatist group orientation to improve performance on a hidden profile task

Effective use of available information is a problem that plagues group decision-making tasks. Groups heavily favor shared information, or information that is known to all group members, which can lead to incorrect decisions and selection of inferior alternatives. However, groups may be less prone to overlooking unshared information if they are focused to value uniqueness and novel input from group members. The present research demonstrates that groups that value uniqueness, or a separatist orientation, correctly solved a hidden profile task more often than groups with a synchronous orientation, or groups that value similarity. Separatist groups repeated more unshared information than synchronous overall. Separatists also repeated more shared information than synchronous groups. Further, groups with a correct minority member also repeated more unshared information than groups with either a majority correct or no correct members. Results are discussed in terms of group focus and biases that affect the discussion of information.

Seeing is believing (or at least changing your mind): The influence of visibility and task complexity on preference changes in computer‐supported team decision making

This article describes an experimental study that examines the extent to which a group decision support system (GDSS), which allows team members to view other members' preference ratings, can encourage changes in individual preferences. We studied 22, four‐person teams performing 2 hidden profile tasks—simple and complex—in a controlled setting. Transparency of the interactions, achieved through the visibility of ratings, influenced changes in participants' preferences as measured before, during and after the team discussion. Visibility of team scores could then offer an effective way to reach consensus, despite individual incumbent preferences. Changes between individuals' initial preferences and team preferences were found to be larger for members working on a complex task compared to a simple task, as were changes between individuals' prediscussion and postdiscussion preferences. Although prior studies established that the initial preferences of individual team members are rather sticky, this study reveals that individuals adjusted their initial preferences to reach a team consensus, as well as modified their preferences after team discussions. Despite the mixed earlier research results on the impact of GDSS on efficient decision making, findings from this study suggest that in complex decision‐making contexts, GDSS tools can be effective in enabling consensus building in groups.

Information sharing as story construction in group decision making

ABSTRACTPrior research in group decision‐making has shown that group members tend to share and focus on the information that is known to the majority of the group but keep the unique information unshared. Tasks created to study this information pooling phenomenon are referred to as hidden profile tasks. A recent hidden profile experiment showed that group members constructed stories to reach their group decision. The study discouraged this storytelling approach and suggested that technology mediation could provide a way to reduce the likelihood of using this approach in discussion. While our experiment confirmed this story construction approach, we found that in the story construction process the participants considered the important arguments as well as different perspectives. We therefore suggest that the story development approach is rational and that the Story model, an existing group process model well‐documented in jury decision making literature, could shed light on the design of collaborative technologies that accommodate or improve such a discussion approach.

Pre‐discussion's note‐taking in hidden profile tasks

ABSTRACTIt was discovered over three decades ago that groups tend to discuss common information while failing to discuss unique information in group decision‐making processes. This is called group's information pooling phenomenon or hidden profile problem. We report a work‐in‐progress study here that examines the effectiveness of using pre‐discussion notes to address hidden profiles in group decision‐making. Our data shows a moderate positive correlation between the appearance of a piece of information in participants’ notes and its appearance in the subsequent discussion, suggesting note‐taking prior to the group discussion as an effective approach. Our data also indicates that hidden profiles can affect the group performance through aspects other than information sharing.

The financial close process: Implications for future research

This study advances our understanding of the current financial close process. Attention to the topic is warranted for four reasons. First, economic volatility and growth in restatements have increased pressure on companies to report performance timely, completely, and accurately to market participants. Second, recent regulations have increased the workload for accountants at period end thus negatively impacting the efficiency of the close process. Third, several SEC filings have contained control weaknesses related to the financial close process. Finally, academic research suggests that the time needed to complete the financial close process may serve as a proxy for a company's internal information environment quality. We draw upon prior research and conduct a field investigation with corporate financial officers from 22 different organizations to examine the role of four factors – need to meet expectations, collaboration among multiple participants, estimation process, and ability to incorporate new regulations – in the financial close process. Results suggest that researchers should examine further how the need to meet (or beat) expectations impacts management's actions and the effectiveness and efficiency of the financial close process. Future work could also explore how hidden profile task research and technology advances may improve the financial close process. Finally, research needs to examine how ex post estimate analysis may improve not only estimate quality but also the effectiveness and efficiency of the financial close process.