Essay Questions
1. What are the major factors underlying how groups make decisions? Illustrate your answer with respect to social loafing, group decision-making, group polarization/‘groupthink’ and brainstorming.
Key Points:
- Most groups exist to get things done, including making decisions and collaborating on group projects.
- Potential group gains in effectiveness and creativity seem to be offset by negative characteristics of group performance.
- Individual motivation can suffer in groups.
- The concept of social loafing and its characteristics.
- Reaching a collective decision.
- The type of rule that is adopted can affect both the group atmosphere and the decision-making process.
- Juries provide an ideal context for research on decision schemes.
- Popular opinion and research on conformity both suggest that groups are conservative and cautious entities, and that they exclude extremes by a process of averaging; two phenomena that challenge this view are group polarization and groupthink.
- A popular method of harnessing group potential is brainstorming; the lack of face-to-face interaction minimizes production blocking.
- Extra credit given for mention of Stroebe and Diehl’s 1994 research into brainstorming and ‘production blocking’.