Academic

Sunstein & Hastie on Failures of Group Deliberation

By Lawrence Solum

Cass R. Sunstein and Reid Hastie (University of Chicago - Law School and University of Chicago - Graduate School of Business) have posted Four Failures of Deliberating Groups on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

Many groups make their decisions through some process of deliberation, usually with the belief that deliberation will improve judgments and predictions. But deliberating groups often fail, in the sense that they make judgments that are false or that fail to take advantage of the information that their members have. There are four such failures. (1) Sometimes the predeliberation errors of group members are amplified, not merely propagated, as a result of deliberation. (2) Groups may fall victim to cascade effects, as the judgments of initial speakers or actors are followed by their successors, who do not disclose what they know. Nondisclosure, on the part of those successors, may be a product of either informational or reputational cascades. (3) As a result of group polarization, groups often end up in a more extreme position in line with their predeliberation tendencies. Sometimes group polarization leads in desirable directions, but there is no assurance to this effect. (4) In deliberating groups, shared information often dominates or crowds out unshared information, ensuring that groups do not learn what their members know. All four errors can be explained by reference to informational signals, reputational pressure, or both. A disturbing result is that many deliberating groups do not improve on, and sometimes do worse than, the predeliberation judgments of their average or median member.

And from the text:

Why does group polarization occur? There are three reasons.51 The first and most important involves the now-familiar idea of informational influence, but in a distinctive form. People respond to the arguments made by other people?and the ?argument pool? in any group with some predisposition in one direction will inevitably be skewed toward that predisposition. As a statistical matter, the arguments favoring the initial position will be more numerous than those pointing in the other direction. Individuals will have heard of some, but not all, of the arguments that emerge from group deliberation. As a result of the relevant arguments, deliberation will lead people toward a more extreme point in line with what group members initially believed.

The second explanation involves social influences. People want to be perceived favorably by other group members. Sometimes people?s publicly stated views are, to a greater or lesser extent, a function of how they want to present themselves. Once they hear what others believe, some will adjust their positions at least slightly in the direction of the dominant position in order to hold onto their preserved self-presentation. They shift accordingly.52

The third explanation of group polarization stresses the close links among confidence, extremism, and corroboration by others.53 As people gain confidence, they usually become more extreme in their beliefs. Agreement from others tends to increase confidence, and for this reason like-minded people, having deliberated with one another, become more sure that they are right and thus more extreme. In many contexts, people?s opinions become more extreme simply because their views have been corroborated, and because they become more confident after learning that others share their views.54 Many minds can badly blunder in this way.

This topic has being receiving quite a bit of attention recently.  Highly recommended.

You might also want to check out: Adrian Vermeule, Many Minds Arguments in Legal Theory.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on April 21, 2008 (boomark / email).