Group Decision-Making Problems

Here are common group decision-making pitfalls, and how Converj avoids them.

• Authority-bias
  • Problem: Participants give excessive trust to claims made by people with authority.
  • Fix: No leaders / moderators
• Group polarization , Group-shift
  • Problem: When a group starts with a biased distribution of opinions, discussion tends to shift opinions even more towards extremes of that bias.
  • Fix: All users see the best opposing reasons.
• Bandwagon effect
  • Problem: Many participants will copy the majority opinion to save effort or blend in.
  • Fix: Vote counts are hidden by default.
  • Fix: Users are encouraged to start creating a unique answer before finding a similar existing answer.
• Group-think , Social-influence , Conformity
  • Problem: Participants tend to avoid conflict by conforming to the majority opinion.
  • Fix: Anonymity, no reputation scores, no penalties for dissent
  • Fix: No chatroom socialization
• Information cascades
  • Problem: Later participants may give excessive trust to answers provided by earlier participants.
  • Fix: The decision process is mostly parallel, less sequential.
  • Fix: Users can observe the information upon which others decide, as reasons or links.
  • Fix: Some amount of convergence is a goal of the system, to cluster users around a few best answers.
• Shared information bias
  • Problem: Participants mostly discuss information that is commonly known, ignoring novel information.
  • Fix: Discussion is structured to minimize repetition of information.
• Filter bubbles
  • Problem: Personalized collaborative filtering systems reduce participants' information overload by recommending information that matches what participants already know, pushing their opinion even further to extremes.
  • Fix: Suggestions are made by topic & quality, not by personal correlation.