Converj
Group Decision-Making Problems
Here are common group decision-making pitfalls, and how Converj avoids them.
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Authority-bias
- Problem: Participants give excessive trust to claims made by people with authority.
- Fix: No leaders / moderators
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Shared information bias
- Problem: Participants mostly discuss information that is commonly known, ignoring novel information.
- Fix: Discussion is structured to minimize repetition of information.
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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.