Advice taking in groups and individuals

A recent debate has revolved around the question how well groups – compared to individuals – make use of advice in a so-called judge-advisor system. In two experiments, we compared the advice taking behavior of 2-person groups to that of individuals. We found that groups consistently weighted the same advice less than individuals. However, this behavior is appropriate only under the assumption that group members combine their independent knowledge and opinions to form the initial group judgment because, in this case, group judgments are bound to be more accurate than those of individuals. Our data suggest that groups made use of advice as if their initial judgments were a combination of their members’ independent opinions, although they were generally not. Initial group judgments were no more accurate than those of individuals, that is, groups did not make use of their increased cognitive resources. The exception was a condition in which group members were explicitly asked to provide independent individual judgments prior to making the initial group judgment; this procedure enabled them to provide more accurate judgments than individuals. In sum, groups seem to act under the assumption that their consensus judgments are an aggregate of their members’ independent opinions, but fail to recognize when this condition is not met.