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Lecture 3-1.3: The Influence Problem
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From the course by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Foundations of Everyday Leadership
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
1168 ratings
Course 1 of 7 in the Specialization Strategic Leadership and Management
From the lesson
Module 3: Group Decision Making
This module will focus on group decision making as a vehicle for helping an everyday leader address some of the limitations of individual decision making. We will also consider the three key determinants of process loss in group decision making that need to be overcome for group decision making to be effective.
Meet the Instructors
Gregory NorthcraftProfessor of Business Administration and Harry J. Gray Professor of Executive Leadership
College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Jack GoncaloProfessor
Department of Business Administration
Jeffrey LoewensteinAssociate Professor of Organizational Behavior
Department of Business Administration
Now the influence problem is a little bit of paradox
because the reason we use groups to make decisions Is because we are uncertain.
And when we are uncertain we want to be influenced by other people.
We want their information to help us make more informed decisions.
The problem is when we are uncertain we are easily influenced by others.
We often look to other people to resolve our uncertainty.
So we want to be influence but that influence can lead the process loss
because once people start talking in a group people start getting influence.
And that means if you are the last person to talk,
what we're going to hear from you is not your unique information, we're going to
hear your unique information as influenced by the people who have already talked.
So we're going to lose your unique information.
So the real paradox of groups is, how do you get everybody to talk first?
A good example, this is provided by the movie 12 Angry Men.
This is a movie about a jury, and the entire movie is shot in the jury's
decision making room, the jurors get their instructions from the judge,
they sit down, and they are trying to solve a problem,
they are trying to decide whether somebody committed a murder.
What I want to do is show you a very brief clip
at the very beginning of the jury's deliberations.
>> Let you know that we, have a first degree murder charge here, and
that we vote the accused guilty, we've got to send him to the chair.
That's mandatory.
>> I think we know that.
>> Let's see who's square.
>> Yeah, we might as well.
>> Okay, anyone doesn't want to vote?
>> Fine with me.
Okay then, just remember that this has to be 12 to nothing, either way.
That's the law.
Okay are we ready?
All those voting guilty, please raise your hands.
One, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.
Okay, that's eleven guilty.
Those voting not guilty?
One, right.
11 guilty, one not guilty.
Well, now we know where we are.
>> Boy, boy there's always one.
>> [LAUGH] Now what did we see in this clip?
What we saw is that at the beginning of these deliberations,
some people knew exactly what they wanted.
They put their hands up very quickly,
indicating that they thought the person was guilty.
But what we also saw were some people who were clearly uncertain.
They were looking around, trying to see what other people were doing, and
they weren't exactly sure whether they should raise their hands.
This is a good example of social influence in action.
You have some people who are uncertain, they are turning to other people and
allowing those people to resolve their uncertainty and
influence them in a way which makes it less likely that they're going to surface
their unique information to help the group make its decision.
Turns out, there are two examples of how this social influence occurs.
One example of this comes from the study of why people don't
help in emergency situations.
And there was a group of studies that was done by some researchers in the 60s.
This research for those of you with a historical bent was actually started
because of a murder in New York City which was witnessed by 50 people,
none of whom rendered assistance to the person who was being murdered.
And the researchers wanted to understand why this happens.
So the picture I'm showing you here is a room,
and what you're seeing in this room is a table,
that's the big red circle, and a couple of chairs, those are the small red circles.
Up in the upper right hand corner, that's a closet, and down at the bottom,
that's a door in and out of the room.
So let's imagine you are going to complete a survey for me.
So I bring you into this room, and I seat you at one of the chairs at the table, and
I tell you it's going to take you about 15 minutes to complete this survey.
If you have any questions, let me know.
At that point, I leave the room closing the door behind me,
you are alone in the room to fill out the survey.
After about five minutes or so you are filling out the survey,
suddenly some little wisps of smoke start to appear out from under the closet door.
And the longer you stay in the room, the more smoke
will pour into the room until eventually the room will actually fill up with smoke.
Now, what do people do when this happens to them alone?
Well most people investigate.
They get up.
They go over they see is the door hot?
No the door is not hot.
Is the closet door locked?
Yes it is locked.
At that point they exit the room to find me and say listen there's something going
on in the room, there's smoke pouring out of the closet.
but what happens if you're doing this with someone else.
And in particular what if you're doing this with someone else who I have told
not to react to the smoke.
So once again, you're brought into the room, there's now two of you.
You're given the survey to fill out.
You sit down to start filling out the survey.
I tell you okay it's going to take you about 15 minutes to fill out the survey.
Remember no talking you have to do this alone.
At that point I leave the room closing the door behind me you start in on the survey.
After about five minutes once again the smoke
starts coming in from under the closet door.
What happens in this circumstance?
Well, if you are filling this out,
the first thing you're going to do when you see that smoke is you're going to turn
your head to see what the other person is doing.
And of course,
I've told that other person not to do anything, not to react to the smoke.
What a lot of people do in this circumstance is they use the other
person's inaction to understand what they should be doing in the situation, and
so what we find is a lot of times people do not react to the smoke.
They go back to the filling out the questionnaire, they see more smoke,
they look at the other person, still not reacting,
back to the survey, more smoke, other persons still not reacting.
Some people stay in the so long that they actually have to wave the smoke away to
continue filling out the questionnaire.
This is an example of influence in action, but the key to this kind of influence
is that no one really knows what the right answer is.
And because we're uncertain we look to that other person to try and
resolve that uncertainty.
But this may cause us to actually censor our own information.
We may not say I'm worried about the smoke.
We may not say I'm unsure about what's going on.
This is an example of process loss that comes from uncertainty about how to react.
Now it turns out there's another example of this problem.
The other example of this problem comes from a famous study that was done
a long time ago.
And this particular study was done to understand
how people react to group pressure.
So once again here on the screen I have for you an example of
the stimulus materials that we're actually used in the experiment.
So imagine that you are subject in their study and you are told that
the point of the study is to look at test lines, that's the line on the left.
And compare it to the three sample lines to try and
determine which sample line is closest in length to the test line.
So think about it.
Which line do you think is closest in length to the test line?
Well most people think it's B.
In fact when people do this alone almost no one gets the wrong answer.
In fact 99% of the time people understand what the right answer is.
But here's the key.
You don't get to do this alone.
When they did this they did this in groups of six or seven people.
And they set it up so that a person who was the actual subject in the study,
didn't know that the other five or six people had been told how to respond.
So we started in on this study.
The first line comes up.
It's obvious what the right answer is.
Everybody seems to agree.
You get the right answer, everybody agrees.
We go on, three, four, five lines, you're beginning to think this is a pretty silly
experiment because the answer is always obvious and
everyone always agrees until we get to the seventh line.
And the seventh line flashes up there and you look at this in you're thinking in
your own mind, hm the right answer must be B.
B is clearly the right answer.
But you don't get to answer first.
You get to hear all the other answers.
And lo and behold,
everybody else starts saying that they think that the right answer is A.
And you hear this over and over again, I think the right answer is A.
I think the right answer is A.
I think the right answer is A.
Well, by the time it gets to you,
there's probably two things that are going on at this point.
The first thing is that you're starting to become a little concerned
that you have misperceived this situation.
You're starting to become a little uncertain about what you think is
clearly true.
The other thing that's probably going on is you're starting to get very anxious
about this because, when people disagree with you it makes people very anxious.
And what they found in this study is that in a significant amount of cases,
people went along with the group and said yeah, okay, the right answer is A.
Now it's not that they thought the right answer was A,
they knew the right answer wasn't A.
It's that they didn't want to disagree with the group.
So, once again, because of the pressure of the group, or
what we often refer to as the tyranny of the group, the group forces somebody to
feel uncomfortable about disagreement, and as a result they are less likely to
volunteer information which might help the group make a more informed decision.
So how do we overcome influence problems?
Well, the most important thing to do is to get people to provide information before
they find out what other people think.
So in a typical brainstorming or
decision making circumstances, one of the best things you can do is to get people to
write a little bit before you start talking about a problem.
When people write It means two things that are very important.
The first thing it means, of course, is we've once again multiplied the air time,
because all of us can write, but if we're talking, only one of us can talk.
So writing gives us more opportunity to surface unique information.
But it also means that you have to commit yourself to your unique information,
before you find out what other people are thinking.
The other thing we want to do in groups is we want to encourage people
who are the most susceptible to influence
to talk first before they know what others are thinking about.
This is a real problem in organizations when we are dealing with decision-making
in vertical groups.
A vertical group is a group where there are multiple levels of an organizational
hierarchy represented.
So in my organization, for example, what if you were in a decision making group
where there was the Dean of the college, and a couple of very senior professors,
a couple of very junior professors, and a couple of students.
And that's a good diverse group.
But the problem with a good diverse group is that sometimes you can get
reporting relationships involved so that some people feel a little uncomfortable
disagreeing with people who might have control over their careers.
So the rule of thumb in those cases is that if you were in a vertical group,
it's always a good idea to have the lower status people talk first.
Find out what their ideas are first before they have a chance to find what the higher
status people think which may influence what they are willing to say.
Another thing we can think about for overcoming influence
is to make disagreement more comfortable by legitimating dissent.
Some of you may have heard of the idea of the Devil's advocate.
The role of a Devil's advocate is simply to disagree with a group.
That's their role, is to create disagreement.
And when somebody disagrees with a group,
that makes everyone else that much more comfortable disagreeing with the group.
Let's go back to this particular situation.
Remember our poor subject in this study
ended up in a situation where all of the group seemed to be aligned against him,
they all thought A was the right answer even though our real subject thought that
B was clearly the right answer.
Well, let's imagine that one person said C was the right answer.
Well our subject obviously thinks C is the wrong answer too, but
C is an answer which disagrees with the group.
So it breaks the consensus of the group.
It legitimizes disagreement.
And when we legitimate disagreement, that makes it much more likely and
much more comfortable for people to disagree with the group.
So the whole idea of the Devil's advocate is get someone to disagree with the group.
And as a consequence to break the consensus make people feel
more comfortable.
And therefore make it more likely that they will volunteer their unique
information which will give us a more informed decision.
So, groups offer the promise of more informed decisions via
diversity of information and perspectives.
That's the whole reason we use groups.
We use groups, well we don't know what the right answer is.
We use groups when we know it can help to have more people's perspectives,
more people's information, a bigger collection of unique information and
perspectives and experience and expertise.
The problem is that the promise of groups is no realized when there is process loss,
when we fail to take of advantage of the information which is represented
by that group.
And process loss is best avoided by overcoming
the three problems we have talked about today.
The composition problem, the participation problem and the influence problem.
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