Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

176 Understanding Rational Decision Making

particular bias: Consumers have a bias for products presented in the far right-hand column of such

matrices and perceive products presented in columns to the left more negatively.^311

Aids to Group Information Acquisition and Critical Thinking

Access to more and better information for decision making is the raison d’être of most groups, yet group

members rarely discuss any relevant information that is not already known by the group as a whole.^312

Surprisingly, groups will often ignore the expertise of their most knowledgeable members.^313 Thus,

groups seldom realize the knowledge gains and improved decision quality they hope for.^314

Information acquisition and decision making can be more effective when the group is small

(four as opposed to eight group members) and the amount of information possessed in common by

its members is minimal.^315 If given enough time, groups usually overcome their tendency to discuss

commonly shared information and start to discuss more information that initially is known only by

single individuals within the group.^316 Under time pressure, groups place much more emphasis on

information that all members share and consequently focus on fewer alternatives.^317

Groups whose members propose different alternatives and have more disagreements communi-

cate more unshared information.^318 They also produce better decisions than groups whose members

all prefer the same alternative at the outset.^319 A study of groups of managers and employees shows

that real dissent is effective in preventing the confi rmation bias, a bias that inhibits group discussion

of unshared information.^320 Dissent is most effective when the dissenting minority provides more

schema-relevant information than the majority and when they forcefully advocate their position.^321

A number of structured group interventions have been designed to improve group information

acquisition and thus enhance the quality and creativity of group decisions, but few of them have

proven to be effective. Contrived dissent, encouraged by techniques such as “Dialectical Inquiry”

and the “Devil’s Advocate Approach,” appears to have little or no effect on decision quality or group

commitment to the decision.^322 Brainstorming has been shown to have questionable effectiveness.^323

Simply brainstorming ideas in a group can actually decrease creativity and productivity.^324 What’s

more, people working in brainstorming groups tend to perform at the level of the least productive

group member.^325 Groups using the “Stepladder Technique,” a technique in which one member at a

time is allowed to join the group discussion, also fail to perform better than unstructured groups.^326

One structured technique—the “Multi-Attribute Utility Decision Decomposition Tech-

nique”—has been shown to enhance effi cient sharing of relevant information among group

members and to improve decision quality.^327 This method, based on the widely used multi-attribute

utility model,^328 helps group members identify and weight decision criteria, identify alternatives,

assign a preference score to each alternative for each decision criteria, and determine the alternative

with the highest overall score. An almost identical technique called “Frame of Reference Training”

has also proven to be highly effective.^329 Essentially, these two techniques help group members

construct a common decision matrix or shared schema and use it to determine the best alternative.

Unlike group brainstorming, testing multiple options against decision criteria in a decision matrix

improves group creativity and the quality of ideas generated.^330

Information acquisition in groups, or the sharing of relevant, previously unshared information

during group discussions, can also be promoted by:

• Publicly designating each group member as an expert in a distinct area.^331 Including partici-

pants with the necessary expertise can actually impair group performance unless the group is

encouraged to make good use of that expertise.^332 When participants are personally identified

and their expertise made known to the rest of the group, more critical information possessed by

only one group member will be shared with the group at large.^333 Team decision making and

performance also improve when all members of the team understand “who knows what.”^334