Although there are at least some member characteristics that have an influence upon jury decision making, group process, as in other working groups, plays a more important role in the outcome of jury decisions than do member characteristics. Like any group, juries develop their own individual norms, and these norms can have a profound impact on how they reach their decisions. Some spend a lot of time in initial planning, whereas others immediately jump right into the deliberation. These two approaches are used about equally often but may in some cases lead to different decisions (Hastie, 2008). Latané, Williams, and Harkins (1979) conducted an experiment that allowed them to measure the extent to which process losses in groups were caused by coordination losses and by social loafing.
Process Losses: Understanding Inefficiencies in Group Performance
However, although he did find that adding individuals to the group increased the overall amount of pulling on the rope, he also found a substantial process loss. The loss was so large that groups of three men pulled at only 85% of their expected capability, whereas groups of eight pulled at only 37% of their expected capability. Despite the potential for some process gains in the presence of others, process losses are more common. Process losses occur regularly on maximizing tasks, and are caused by both the difficulty of coordinating the performance of the individuals and by the tendency of individuals to reduce their effort when they are in groups.
Brainstorming: Is It Effective?
This equation indicates that the behavior of an individual is a function of both the individual (person) characteristics as well as the influence of the other people in their social environment. The relationship is dynamic because changes in the group affect the individual, and changes in the individual affect the group. Finally, we can differentiate intellective task problems for which there is an objectively correct decision from those in which there is not a clear best decision. On a criterion task, the group can see that there is a clearly correct answer to the problem that is being posed.
Diane Mackie (1986) had participants listen to three people discussing a topic, supposedly so that they could become familiar with the issue themselves to help them make their own decisions. However, the individuals that they listened to were said to be members of a group that they would be joining during the upcoming experimental session, members of a group that they were not expecting to join, or some individuals who were not a group at all. Mackie found that the perceived norms of the (future) ingroup were seen as more extreme than those of the other group or the individuals, and that the participants were more likely to agree with the arguments of the ingroup.
Thus, group development involves not just changes in the group as a group, but rather the evolution and change of the relationships between the group and its individual members. Another important outcome of group interaction is the satisfaction of the group members with their experiences in the group, group member satisfaction. Positive social interactions and relationships among the group members are important for effective group functioning. One approach to assessing the meaning of groups for individuals is to assess the cohesion of the group. Group cohesion is the positive emotional attachment that group members have with the other members of the group. A group is said to be cohesive to the extent that the group members are attracted to the other group members, feel that they are part of the group, want to stay in the group, and find the group important to them (Evans & Dion, 2012).
When important decisions need to be made, or when tasks need to be performed quickly or effectively, we frequently create groups to accomplish them. Many people believe that groups are effective for making decisions and performing other tasks (Nijstad, Stroebe, & Lodewijkx, 2006), and such a belief seems commonsensical. To mitigate process losses, it is important to establish clear goals and expectations for group members, as well as to foster open communication and collaboration.
Nevertheless, with these caveats in mind, it is possible to draw some tentative conclusions about when and why groups make better decisions than individuals, and also when and why they may end up making worse ones. Groups that set specific, difficult, and yet attainable goals (for instance, “improve sales by 10% over the next six months”) are much more effective than groups that are given goals that are not very clear (“let’s sell as much as we can!”; Locke & Latham, 2013). Making the group tasks more interesting will improve group member satisfaction and performance. Rewarding individual group members for performance can be effective but may create comparisons among the group members, which can disrupt group harmony. People who strongly identify with a group are less likely to engage in social loafing than those who weakly identify.
Process Losses and Process Gains
This finding supports the idea that group norms are perceived as more extreme for groups that people identify with (in this case, because they were expecting to join it in the future). And another experiment by Mackie (1986) also supported the social identity prediction current assets definition lists and formula 2023 that the existence of a rival outgroup increases polarization as the group members attempt to differentiate themselves from the other group by adopting more extreme positions. A number of explanations have been proposed for the failure of brainstorming to be effective, and many of these have been found to be important. One obvious problem is social loafing by the group members, and at least some research suggests that this does cause part of the problem. For instance, Paulus and Dzindolet (1993) found that social loafing in brainstorming groups occurred in part because individuals perceived that the other group members were not working very hard, and they matched they own behavior to this perceived norm. However, for some of the face-to-face groups, the researchers set up a television camera to record the contributions of each of the participants in order to make individual contributions to the discussion identifiable.
Even if groups are able to get beyond the process losses that result from coordination difficulties and social loafing, they can make effective decisions only when they are able to make use of the advantages that come with group membership. These advantages include the ability to pool the information that is known to each of the members and to test out contradictory ideas through group discussion. Group decisions can be better than individual decisions only when the group members act carefully and rationally—considering all the evidence and coming to an unbiased, fair, and open decision. Drawing from the findings in the social facilitation literature, as well as from our understanding of group processes more generally, we might expect that process gains would occur primarily in groups that have a lot of experience working together and that are well trained for the task that they are performing.
- Although there are at least some member characteristics that have an influence upon jury decision making, group process, as in other working groups, plays a more important role in the outcome of jury decisions than do member characteristics.
- Although group discussion generally improves the quality of a group’s decisions, this is true only if the group discusses the information that is most useful to the decision that needs to be made.
- A variety of research has found that the presence of others can create social facilitation—an increase in task performance—on many types of tasks.
- Judgmental tasks involve such decisions as determining the innocence or guilt of an accused person in a jury or making an appropriate business decision.
- Ringelmann found that although more men pulled harder on a rope than fewer men did, there was a substantial process loss in comparison with what would have been expected on the basis of their individual performances.
- Each individual has the comments of all of the other group members handy and can read them when it is convenient.
In some early experiments studying group performance conducted by Triplett (1898), racers who were competing with other cyclers rode significantly faster than cyclers who were racing nashville bookkeeping services alone, against the clock. Supporting the idea that the presence of competition, or even just a passive audience, can increase performance, subsequent studies have shown that the presence of others can increase performance on maximizing tasks, including jogging, shooting pool, lifting weights, and working on math and computer problems. The effects of diffuse status are problematic for working groups when group members make inferences about the likely performance of an individual on the basis of his or her status characteristics. Individuals with low diffuse status are perceived as less effective group members even though they may well be effective contributors.
This approach assumes is that there is a set of potential arguments that support any given opinion and another set of potential arguments that refute that opinion. Group polarization is said to occur when, after discussion, the attitudes held by the individual group members become more extreme than they were before the group began discussing the topic (Brauer, Judd, & Gliner, 2006; Myers, 1982). Follow-up research (Diehl & Stroebe, 1991) showed that the main factor responsible for productivity loss in face-to-face brainstorming groups is that the group members are not able to make good use of the time they are forced to spend waiting for others. First, as the number of people in the group increased (from one to two to six), each person’s individual input got smaller, demonstrating the process loss that the groups created. Furthermore, the decrease for real groups (the lower line) is greater than the decrease for the groups created by summing the contributions of the individuals. Because performance in the summed groups is a function of motivation but not coordination, and the performance in real groups is a function of both motivation and coordination, Latané and his colleagues effectively showed how much of the process loss was due to each.
The strong influence of the majority is probably due to both informational conformity (i.e., that there are more arguments supporting the favored position) and normative conformity (the people on the majority side have greater social influence). However, although people sometimes perform better when they are in groups than they do alone, the situation is not that simple. Perhaps you remember an experience when you performed a task (playing the piano, shooting basketball free throws, giving a public presentation) very well alone but poorly with, or in front of, others.
Zajonc argued that when we are with others, we experience more arousal than we do when we are alone, and that this arousal increases the likelihood that we will perform the dominant response—the action that we are most likely to emit in any given situation. In summary, the most important conclusion to be drawn from the literature that has studied brainstorming is that the technique is less effective than expected because group members are required to do other things in addition to being creative. One variation on the brainstorming idea is known as the nominal group technique (Delbecq, Van de Ven, & Gustafson, 1975). Other similar approaches include the Delphi technique (Clayton, 1997; Hornsby, Smith, & Gupta, 1994) and Synectics (Stein, 1978).