Talk by Thomas Schultze-Gerlach (Goettingen): "How groups use advice"

Affective Neuroscience and Psychophysiology  

Colloquium

Thomas Schultze-Gerlach

(Goettingen)

26.11.2019 18:00 - 20:00 — GEMI, Room 1.134, Gosslerstr. 14, Goettingen

How groups use advice.

Advice is a frequent element of communication both in our private lives and in professional contexts. Given that our advisors are competent and benevolent, it can also serve as a simple but effective means to make better judgments and decisions. Accordingly, the question how – and how well – we use advice has fascinated researchers for the past three decades. However, the vast majority of the research on advice taking has focused on individual decision-makers. Notwithstanding the importance of this research, this neglect of groups as advisees can be problematic because groups are the predominant type of decision-makers in many societal, economic, and political contexts. Thus, it is highly relevant to understand how groups use advice, whether their advice taking behavior differs from that of individuals, and, in particular, whether they are better or worse than individuals at harnessing the wisdom of their advisors. I will present a series of studies aiming to provide a first answer to these questions. At the core of these studies is a simple descriptive model of advice taking in groups. Accordingly, I will present some tests of this model using groups of various sizes and discuss what we can learn from those cases, in which the model made accurate predictions, and from those where it failed to do so.