MANAGEMENT
WHY SELF-AWARENESS IS THE KEY TO MORE EFFECTIVE TEAM DISCUSSIONS
When we’re unsure of an answer to a question or need help solving a problem, we often turn to our co-workers for
collaboration. Indeed, businesses and organizations have long relied on the wisdom of the crowd to produce better outcomes than the individual can achieve alone. But new research from Penn Integrates Knowledge professor Barbara Mellers and Wharton doctoral student Ike Silver challenges that notion, revealing that sometimes the crowd can be overly confident without merit. In their paper, “Wise Teamwork: Collective Confidence Calibration Predicts the Effectiveness of Group Discussion,” the researchers explain why the composition of the group is critical to achieving better results. They recently spoke with Knowledge@Wharton about their research and why the best teams should be made up of people who are self-aware.
An edited transcript of the conversation follows.
Knowledge@Wharton: The idea behind the wisdom of crowds is that pooling judgments from individuals can lead to greater accuracy. But you note in your paper that when the crowd engages in conversations, sometimes accuracy can suffer. Why?
Ike Silver: The idea of the wisdom of crowds draws on this very intuitive statistical fact, which is that if you take a group of independent people and ask them a difficult question, nearly all of them will get the question wrong. But on aggregate, they will often get the question wrong in ways that are unbiased and uncorrelated, meaning that their errors will cancel out on average. When we allow people to talk to one another, their errors become correlated, which is to say that they listen to one another. That can be a really great thing if the group is mostly listening to someone who is on the smarter end of the distribution of people in the group. But it can also be a bad thing if people are listening to someone who is persuasive but not necessarily knowledgeable. In the context of discussions, there
have been other well-documented biases that can arise, too. One of
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them is that groups tends to listen to ideas that are held more broadly at the expense of unique expertise held by specific individuals. So, groups will sometimes ignore individuals who have unique ideas that might be helpful because they’re not the prevailing views.
The other thing that happens in discussions is that people will start to care about how they look to others, and that can just be distracting, which can exacerbate some of the other biases that I mentioned.
Barbara Mellers: There’s lots of work on groupthink, conformity and bystander intervention that shows how ineffective groups can be. That’s well-documented in the psychological literature.
Silver: The other thing we should mention is that conversations are costly, so there’s some reason to believe upfront that we should use them sparingly. You’re putting people in a room, you’re asking them to spend their time. There are logistical considerations. There are costs associated with conducting discussions in the first place.
Mellers: But for the most part, [people] like to get together and talk about things, so it doesn’t feel costly. Knowledge@Wharton: What
was the big question you set out to answer with this research?
“Discussion had a variety of effects, and the big question for us was, ‘What predicts when discussion helps?’” –Barbara Mellers
Mellers: We wanted to know the conditions under which discussions helped people’s judgment, and we came up with a paradigm to answer that question that’s really quite simple. We had people come into the Wharton Behavioral Lab. We put them in front of computers, took away their cellphones so they couldn’t look up the answers, and then asked them questions like, “What’s the diameter of Neptune?” Or, “What’s the population of Madagascar?” Or, “In what year was the printing press invented?” The first thing they did was to put their independent estimate into the computer. Then we had them turn their chairs around and talk to three other people for two or three minutes and see if they could collectively come up with a better answer than what they had said independently. They chatted, and when that period was over, they
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