Article Abstract

Lavery, T. A., Franz, T. M., Winquist, J. R., & Larson, J. R., Jr.  (1999).  The role of information exchange in predicting group accuracy on a multiple judgment task.  Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 21, 281-289.

Abstract.  This study examined whether the discussion of unshared information (i.e., information initially held by only one group member prior to discussion) is related to group judgment accuracy.  Thirty-nine 3-person groups were asked to judge how likely it was that each of 36 hypothetical high school dropouts would eventually return to school.  These judgments were based on nine pieces of information about each dropout, some of which were given to all group members prior to discussion (shared information) and some of which were divided among them (unshared information).  Further, this information was distributed in such a way that for a given case the members' prediscussion preferences would tend to be either inaccurate (hidden profiles) or accurate (manifest profiles) relative to the optimal judgment based on all of the information available to the entire group (i.e., both shared and unshared information).  Results indicated that there was no relation between the amount of unshared information discussed and group accuracy on hidden-profile cases.  Instead, the results suggested that group accuracy was determined by how accurate members were prior to discussion, and that the vital role of group discussion was not to exchange information but to aggregate member preferences into a consensual group judgment.