Does competence feedback improve group performance in quantitative judgment tasks?

Group judgments have tremendous impact on our daily lives. In the present study, we investigated whether providing group members with feedback about each other's expertise improves group performance in quantitative judgement tasks. Participants first worked on ten tasks individually and, thereafter, solved another twenty in three-person groups. Members of feedback groups were informed about each other's mean absolute percent error during the ten individual trials. Control groups received no feedback. Regression analysis showed that, after correcting for the group members' initial competence, feedback significantly increased group performance. This effect was stronger for groups consisting of members with low initial competence.