Combining group facilitation, decision modeling, and information technology to improve the accuracy of group judgment

Interacting groups fail to make judgments as accurate as those of their most capable members due to problems associated with both interaction processes and cognitive processing. Group process techniques and decision analytic tools have been used with groups to combat these problems. While such techniques and tools do improve the quality of group judgment, they have not enabled groups to make judgments more accurate than those of their most capable members. A new intervention procedure that integrates group facilitation, decision modeling and information technology was developed to overcome more fully the problems typically associated with interaction processes and cognitive processing. An experiment involving 16 four- and five-member groups was conducted to test this intervention process. Results indicated that the process intervention enabled small, interacting groups to perform significantly better than their most capable members on two cognitive conflict tasks (p<.05)