Collective estimation: Accuracy, expertise, and extroversion as sources of intra-group influence☆
Section snippets
Collective estimation
In their review of the literature, Stasser and Dietz-Uhler (2001) assert that cooperative group tasks can be meaningfully distinguished on two dimensions: selection tasks vs. rating tasks and intellective tasks vs. judgmental tasks. The first of these distinctions is relatively straight-forward. Decision-making groups are typically in a position where they are called upon to either choose an option or options that are most attractive in some way (e.g., “who is the best job candidate?”) or,
Intra-group influence
In a typical group estimation setting, a collection of individuals bring their knowledge and expertise together with the goal of reaching an answer that is in some way optimal. The process by which groups go about generating a single collective response from a collection of member preferences has historically been of great interest to social scientists. Although research in this area has taken many forms, two broad categories include the social combination approach (e.g., Davis, 1973, Laughlin,
Recent empirical work
Four recent studies have focused on the effects of frames of reference in collective estimation. The results of these studies are somewhat mixed, with two finding that groups outperformed individual comparisons (Laughlin et al., 1999b, Laughlin et al., 2003), whereas two others did not (Bonner et al., 2004: studies 1 and 2). The results are also mixed with regard to whether the presence of frames of reference affected performance. Although three studies found that the performance of estimators
Hypotheses
The current study seeks to examine a relatively small set of moderately difficult estimations generated by 6-member groups with and without external frames of reference. Although the core focus of this paper is on the modeling of the group estimation process, our understanding of the effectiveness of the group estimation process is meaningfully bolstered by an examination of the performance of the groups relative to individual estimators. A number of studies have found that groups generally
Participants
The participants in this study were 420 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory course in organizational behavior at the University of Utah. Of these participants, a randomly selected 360 participated in this study as members of 6-person groups while the remaining 60 participated as individuals. All participants received course credit for participating in this 1 hour study.
Procedure, materials, and design
This study used an I-I/I-G design, with a set of 10 items (see Appendix A) administered in one randomly
Item characteristics
Our goal was to select estimation items that were of moderate difficulty compared to past work involving framed estimations (e.g., Laughlin et al., 1999b). With this criterion in mind we chose items that were likely to be interesting and accessible to our sample of participants. Given that different items implicitly required responses on different scales (e.g., elevations in thousands of feet or populations in millions of people), absolute deviation scores were computed [(absolute value of
Discussion
Although collective estimations are a ubiquitous feature of the every day world, little scientific research has been conducted in this area (Stasser & Dietz-Uhler, 2001). In this study, 6-person groups and individuals estimated “real world” values with and without external frames of reference. Items in this study were designed to be interesting and challenging to participants but not impossibly difficult. In addition to assessing the quality of group estimations, we also tested the fit of a set
Conclusions
Although many quandaries in our world are still entrusted to the hands of individuals, we rely increasingly on groups to generate decisions, judgments, and estimates. We found in this study that groups were very good at incorporating quality member inputs into their estimates but only when they had external information to guide their decisions. When this information was not available, extroverts irrespective of their expertise heavily influenced group estimates. These findings further our
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The authors thank LaNae McCann for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.