Group size, member ability, and social decision schemes on an intellective task.

Abstract

Subjects were 510 college students who first took Part 1 of the difficult Terman Concept Mastery Test as individuals and then retook the same test in cooperative high-ability or low-ability groups of sizes two through five or as control individuals. Nine a priori social decision scheme models were tested as theories of the underlying group process. An a posteriori social decision scheme was also induced from a comparable previous study with 240 four-person groups and then tested against the current groups. The best-fitting a priori social decision scheme suggested an underlying "truth-supported wins" process, a finding which was more pronounced with increasing group size and for highability groups. However, the a posteriori principle, representing a combination of a truth-supported wins process, strong conformity pressures against a single correct member, and an increment from grouping when no member was correct, fit the current data better than any of the a priori social decision schemes.A recent theoretical approach to small group performance is to organize the social interaction as a social decision scheme (e.g.,

Intuitive and reflective inferences

“…It has now been repeatedly shown that, provided certain minimal conditions are met (the good answer must be accessible to at least one of the participants for instance), what is observed is that in such contexts, if one of the participants has the correct answer, then the other members will get to it too. This has been shown for mathematical tasks (Laughlin & Ellis, 1986;Stasson, Kameda, Parks, Zimmerman, & Davis, 1991), ‗Eureka' problems (in which the correct solution seems obvious in retrospect- Laughlin, Kerr, Davis, Halff, & Marciniak, 1975), and Mastermind problems (from the board game -Bonner, Baumann, & Dalal, 2002). In all these cases the performance of groups tends to be at the level of the best participants taken individually.…”

The Effect of Group Decision Making on Cooperation in Social Dilemmas

“…Consistent with this idea, when, in this experiment, we asked groups to make an explicit decision about how members should choose, groups that did not decide to cooperate did not show the group discussion effect to the same extent as groups that decided to cooperate. We hypothesized that the reason why a group's consensus is to cooperate, rather than not, is that the social situation inspires group members to perceive that the mutually cooperative solution to the dilemma is demonstrably correct, meaning that only one or two members who favour the cooperative solution will be able to carry the group to this conclusion (see Laughlin, 1980;Laughlin et al, 1975;. To provide evidence in support of this idea, we attempted to manipulate the demonstrability of the cooperative solution for all discussion groups.…”

“…Following the terminology developed in the group problem-solving literature (e.g. Davis, 1969;Laughlin, Kerr, Davis, Halff, & Marciniak, 1975;Steiner, 1972), we call the corresponding social decision schemes (see Davis, 1973) C-wins and C-supported-wins respectively. In sum, if during group discussion about a social dilemma the group reaches a consensus as determined by rules such as C-wins or C-supported-wins, then a robust group discussion effect would be expected.…”

A Theory of Collective Induction

“…Truth-supported wins, in which two correct members are necessary and sufficient for a correct group response, is the best-fitting social combination process on general world knowledge, vocabulary, and analogy items (Laughlin & Adamopoulos, 1980Laughlin, Kerr, Davis, Halff, & Marciniak, 1975;Laughlin, Kerr, Munch, & Haggarty, 1976). These tasks fit the four conditions of demonstrability of Postulate 3, but the correct answers are not intuitively obvious or immediately evident once proposed.…”