“People just don’t seem to realize that conversation can have negative effects on the accuracy of their judgments on a particular estimation task.” –Barbara Mellers
The second tip would be to listen to the estimate of every single person in the group. Don’t let anybody get by without speaking. Take the shy people in the corner who aren’t saying anything and also ask them the reasons behind their estimates. The third tip would be simply,
“Don’t adjust your estimate unless you trust the reasons behind it.” We are working on some new studies to see if some of these tips could have a beneficial effect, and we’d like to get people to become better calibrated and then, following from that, become more accurate in their estimations.
Knowledge@Wharton: Are there any other questions that this research opens up that you think would merit a look?
Silver: Yes. I mentioned the illusion of effective discussion, which is this idea that people will sometimes have undue confidence in the power of discussion to improve their judgment. We found that in this preliminary data. It wasn’t our key research question. But we’re conducting further studies to try to understand what exactly is going on in discussions that is increasing people’s confidence. Is it having access to other people’s answers? Is that enough to produce these confidence increases? Is it something about interacting that causes people to feel like their accuracy has increased?
Another interesting related question is, “Do you even have to participate in a discussion at all to feel like discussion improves the quality of answers?” Suppose you were a manager and wanted to ask a team of employees to come up with an answer to a particular question. You could elicit their independent answers and aggregate them in some way, or you could ask them, “Hey, go have a discussion about this. Schedule some time, think about it deeply, and come back to me.” What we think is that managers
probably have the intuition that the latter is going to get them a better answer. But our research suggests that the latter is only going to get them a better answer some of the time. From a managerial perspective, how can we train people to know when it’s a
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good idea to ask your employees to engage in discussion versus when it’s a better idea to say, “Give me your independent answers. I’ll aggregate them in some simple way, and that will be enough wisdom for whatever it is that I’m trying to do.”
Republished with permission from Knowledge@Wharton (
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu), the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
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