MANAGEMENT
would become more accurate after discussion, relative to before.
“Listening to the most confident person is a good strategy when the most confident person also happens to have pretty good judgment.” –Ike Silver
Silver: I’ll just mention a little bit about why we think that that’s happening. When our participants went into the discussion phase, they were sitting in a circle with four or five other participants, and their task was to figure out, “How can I take this conversation and improve my estimate?” Part of doing that well is figuring out who is knowledgeable amongst the group – whom to listen to.
But these questions are challenging. The answers aren’t obvious, so it’s hard to know whom you should listen to. There’s another well- documented effect in the literature on conversations, which is that in the absence of information about who is knowledgeable, individuals will rely on expressed confidence as a cue. You’ll listen to the most confident person or someone who’s more assertive and leans into the conversation.
Mellers: That’s not a bad cue in many cases.
Silver: Right. So we were trying to explain: When is that going to be a good strategy, and when is it going to be a bad strategy? It turns out that listening to the most confident person is a good strategy when the most confident person also happens to have pretty good judgment. But listening to the most confident person is not a great idea when that person doesn’t happen to be one of
36
DOMmagazine.com | may 2020
the more knowledgeable members of the group. We were therefore exploiting variation in pre-discussion calibration to predict when listening to the most confident person was going to be a good idea. We also asked participants to identify who was the most knowledgeable member of their group, and we found success in that task, too, was a signpost for beneficial discussions.
Knowledge@Wharton: In your paper, you also mention “the illusion of effective discussion.” What is that, and why is it important?
Mellers: One thing that regularly happened, regardless of whether group discussion had a positive effect, was that the average confidence in the group increased after discussion relative to before. And that got us thinking. Ike, do you want to go on from there?
Silver: Sure. When we looked at the data, what we found was that groups became more confident in their answers about 90% of the time. Groups nearly always thought that discussion improved their answer — at least that’s our interpretation. In addition, we asked them explicitly, “Do you think the discussion helped you?” And we also asked them to predict beforehand, “Do you think discussion will help you?” We found that, before interacting, they said, “Yes, discussion will help me. These questions are hard.” Then afterwards, they said, “Absolutely. My answer got better from talking to other people.” But in reality, there was great variation in whether or not discussion actually improved groups’ answers. Groups improved on average only about 55% or 60% of the time. We’d call that undue confidence. The cases in which groups’ confidence increased but their accuracy didn’t: That’s the “the illusion of effective discussion.” It’s a very tentative name for it, but it’s a pattern in the data that
we observed and that we’re interested in looking into further.
“It does seem that there’s something about talking to other people that makes you really feel like you’re getting smarter.” –Ike Silver
Mellers: It’s kind of a warm glow that comes from the conversation. “OK, I’m doing due diligence. I’m talking to my friends or colleagues about this question.” People just don’t seem to realize that conversation can have negative effects on the accuracy of their judgments on a particular estimation task.
Knowledge@Wharton: This reminds me a lot of sitting alone in a room, Googling your symptoms and self-diagnosing your illness. It’s almost like engaging in a conversation, where you’re getting all this feedback that may or may not be right.
Mellers: A friend of mine calls that “cyberchondria.”
Silver: That’s exactly right. We think that when people can engage in, as Barbara said, due diligence, their confidence will go up in their answer whether or not their answer actually improves. What we’re particularly interested in is whether that due diligence-to-confidence pathway is even stronger in a group discussion context. It does seem that there’s something about talking to other people that makes you really feel like you’re getting smarter, maybe even in ways that just sitting by yourself and doing research or deliberating further might not necessarily do.
Knowledge@Wharton: What are the practical implications of your research for companies and organizations?
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52
