This study is comparing individuals having complete knowledge vs. a team with individuals having incomplete knowledge. Yes, the communication complexity tax must be paid. What am I missing?
Common-knowledge effect: A bias in team decision making
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Re: Common-knowledge effect: A bias in team decision making
#12I think this might be one reason why pair programming can be difficult at times. I’ve personally found success in pair programming, but it usually came after adopting an attitude of moving past the stuff we know and trying a more free, humble approach. This isn’t the best way to put it, but for lack of better words just starting with the mentality of admitting that it’s ok not to know what to do next and that we’re h…
Yeah, I think of this as the locker room effect. If you're not used to it, undressing in a locker room can feel scary. You're naked! But once you get used to it, you realize everybody is naked and it's fine.
But that's conditional on everybody not being jerks. Anybody who tries to score points by pointing out weaknesses is toxic to open and honest collaboration.
Re: Common-knowledge effect: A bias in team decision making
#13This study is comparing individuals having complete knowledge vs. a team with individuals having incomplete knowledge. Yes, the communication complexity tax must be paid. What am I missing?
you're missing what the summary says: teams often make worse decisions than individuals by relying too much on widely understood data while disregarding information possessed by only a few individuals
Re: Common-knowledge effect: A bias in team decision making
#14If you're going for "none os us is smarter than all of us", the flaw in such group decisions is that they are made openly in the group. The first opinion influences the next and so on, and the louder and most persistent opinion gain more weight in the final decision than they deserve. The biases pile up and the quality of the decision goes down.
In order to take advantage of the knowledge of the many, each individual needs to form their opinion independent of the influence of the others. From there you move on to a structured and mediated discussion (i.e., not an adhoc free for all). Of course, participants can change their minds, but they do so based more careful considerations and far less based on the emotions and biases of a traditional group decisions.
See "The Influencial Mind" by Tali Sharot for more details.
Re: Common-knowledge effect: A bias in team decision making
#15> Project statements were distributed unevenly
This seems to be comparing the effects of the distribution of mostly positive information about two bad projects with the distribution of mostly negative information about one good project.
The source of the stated bias cannot be concluded without isolating for the effects of the other variables and this study seems to be lacking significant permutations of information sentiment, distribution strategy and project quality to be meaningful.
It could also be the case that negative information spreads more easily or that positive information is harder to introduce into a group than negative information. Both of these conclusions seem equally derivable from the results of this very limited study.
Re: Common-knowledge effect: A bias in team decision making
#16Does anyone actually believe that teams make better decisions than individuals?
Re: Common-knowledge effect: A bias in team decision making
#17Does anyone actually believe that teams make better decisions than individuals?
Yes.
Re: Common-knowledge effect: A bias in team decision making
#18This study is comparing individuals having complete knowledge vs. a team with individuals having incomplete knowledge. Yes, the communication complexity tax must be paid. What am I missing?
It's not that the other people have incomplete knowledge, it is that they disregard it.
Re: Common-knowledge effect: A bias in team decision making
#19This study is comparing individuals having complete knowledge vs. a team with individuals having incomplete knowledge. Yes, the communication complexity tax must be paid. What am I missing?
you're missing what the summary says: teams often make worse decisions than individuals by relying too much on widely understood data while disregarding information possessed by only a few individuals
I think OP is on to something here. In particular the study design makes it hard to tease out issues specific to common knowledge verses anchoring or bias towards ones own knowledge. Notably each individual's information set makes B look worse than A or C.
I think the study would have been more compelling if the common knowledge favored A and C but each individual's total knowledge was neutral between the A,B and C. If results favored not B in that set up it would indicate that folks were specifically anchoring on the common knowledge itself rather than anchoring on their initial hypothesis.
Re: Common-knowledge effect: A bias in team decision making
#20This study is comparing individuals having complete knowledge vs. a team with individuals having incomplete knowledge. Yes, the communication complexity tax must be paid. What am I missing?
It's not that the other people have incomplete knowledge, it is that they disregard it.
>It's not that the other people have incomplete knowledge, it is that they disregard it.
From the article:
"If each team member is provided with all project statements, then the team can match the decision-making effectiveness of an individual (which is about 80%)."
So depending on who got which portion of which information is the critical part here, bringing communication and social skills into it. Human skills are then much more important then pure technical knowledge. This seems to be the truth in other settings as well.