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Abilene Paradox
In the Abilene paradox, a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of many or all of the individuals in the group. It involves a common breakdown of group communication in which each member mistakenly believes that their own preferences are counter to the group's and, therefore, does not raise objections, or even states support for an outcome they do not want. A common phrase relating to the Abilene paradox is a desire to not "rock the boat". This differs from groupthink in that the Abilene paradox is characterized by an inability to manage agreement. Explanation The term was introduced by management expert Jerry B. Harvey in his 1974 article "The Abilene Paradox: The Management of Agreement". The name of the phenomenon comes from an anecdote that Harvey uses in the article to elucidate the paradox: The Abilene paradox is similar to groupthink; however, groupthink individuals are not acting contrary to their conscious wishes a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Group Communication
Communication in small groups consists of three or more people who share a common goal and communicate collectively to achieve it. During small group communication, interdependent participants analyze data, evaluate the nature of the problem(s), decide and provide a possible solution or procedure. Additionally, small group communication provides strong feedback, unique contributions to the group as well as a critical thinking analysis and self-disclosure from each member. Small groups communicate through an interpersonal exchange process of information, feelings and active listening in both two types of small groups: primary groups and secondary groups. Group communication The first important research study of small group communication was performed in front of a live studio audience in Hollywood California by social psychologist Robert Bales and published in a series of books and articles in the early and mid 1950s .Bales, R. F. (1950). ''Interaction process analysis''. Page 33. C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Group Polarization
In social psychology, group polarization refers to the tendency for a group to make decisions that are more extreme than the initial inclination of its members. These more extreme decisions are towards greater risk if individuals' initial tendencies are to be risky and towards greater caution if individuals' initial tendencies are to be cautious. The phenomenon also holds that a group's attitude toward a situation may change in the sense that the individuals' initial attitudes have strengthened and intensified after group discussion, a phenomenon known as attitude polarization. Overview Group polarization is an important phenomenon in social psychology and is observable in many social contexts. For example, a group of women who hold moderately feminist views tend to demonstrate heightened pro-feminist beliefs following group discussion. Similarly, studies have shown that after deliberating together, mock jury members often decided on punitive damage awards that were either larger ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conformity
Conformity is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to group norms, politics or being like-minded. Norms are implicit, specific rules, shared by a group of individuals, that guide their interactions with others. People often choose to conform to society rather than to pursue personal desires - because it is often easier to follow the path others have made already, rather than forging a new one. Thus, conformity is sometimes a product of group communication. This tendency to conform occurs in small groups and/or in society as a whole and may result from subtle unconscious influences (predisposed state of mind), or from direct and overt social pressure. Conformity can occur in the presence of others, or when an individual is alone. For example, people tend to follow social norms when eating or when watching television, even if alone. The Asch Conformity Experiment demonstrates how much influence conformity has on people. In a laboratory experiment, Asch asked 50 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Wisdom Of Crowds
''The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations'', published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology. The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton's surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox's true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members). The book relates to diverse collections of independently deciding individuals, rather than crowd psychology as traditionally understood. Its central thesis, that a diverse collection of independently deciding ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Asch Conformity Experiments
In psychology, the Asch conformity experiments or the Asch paradigm were a series of studies directed by Solomon Asch studying if and how individuals yielded to or defied a majority group and the effect of such influences on beliefs and opinions.Asch, S.E. (1952b). "Social psychology". Englewood Cliffs, NJ:Prentice Hall. Developed in the 1950s, the methodology remains in use by many researchers. Uses include the study of conformity effects of task importance, age, sex, and culture. Initial conformity experiment Rationale Many early studies in social psychology were adaptations of earlier work on "suggestibility" whereby researchers such as Edward L. Thorndyke were able to shift the preferences of adult subjects towards majority or expert opinion. Still the question remained as to whether subject opinions were actually able to be changed, or if such experiments were simply documenting a Hawthorne effect in which participants simply gave researchers the answers they want ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spiral Of Silence
The spiral of silence theory is a political science and mass communication theory proposed by the German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. It states that an individual's perception of the distribution of public opinion influences that individual's willingness to express their own political opinions. The main idea is that people influence each other's willingness to express opinions through social interaction. According to the spiral of silence theory, individuals will be more confident and outward with their opinion when they notice that their personal opinion is shared throughout a group. But if the individual notices that their opinion is unpopular with the group they will be more inclined to be reserved and remain silent. The individual "not isolating himself is more important than his own judgement". This is a self-expressive act that can change the "global environment of opinion", shifting the perceptions of others and the willingness of individuals to express th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Public Choice
Public choice, or public choice theory, is "the use of economic tools to deal with traditional problems of political science".Gordon Tullock, 9872008, "public choice," '' The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics''. . Its content includes the study of political behavior. In political science, it is the subset of positive political theory that studies self-interested agents (voters, politicians, bureaucrats) and their interactions, which can be represented in a number of ways – using (for example) standard constrained utility maximization, game theory, or decision theory. It is the origin and intellectual foundation of contemporary work in political economy.Alberto Alesina, Torsten Persson, Guido Tabellini, 2006. “Reply to Blankart and Koester's Political Economics versus Public Choice Two Views of Political Economy in Competition,” Kyklos, 59(2), pp. 201–208 In popular use, "public choice" is often used as a shorthand for components of modern public choice theory t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pseudoconsensus
A pseudoconsensus is a false consensus, reached most commonly when members of a group feel they are expected to go along with the majority decision, as when the voting basis is a large supermajority and nothing can be done unless some of the members of the minority acquiesce. This can cause problems such as the Abilene paradox. Robert's Rules of Order notes that this was part of the impetus for switching from consensus to majority as the voting basis in the British House of Lords: The book ''Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages'' identifies pseudoconsensus as a problem that can occur in communal environments with a consensus voting basis. Various forms of pseudoconsensus identified were the Big League Complex; Decision by Endurance; Everyone Decides Everything; and "I Block, I Block!" See also * Consensus decision-making * False-consensus effect *Groupthink *Pluralistic ignorance In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance refers to a situation in which th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prisoner's Dilemma
The Prisoner's Dilemma is an example of a game analyzed in game theory. It is also a thought experiment that challenges two completely rational agents to a dilemma: cooperate with their partner for mutual reward, or betray their partner ("defect") for individual reward. This dilemma was originally framed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher while working at RAND in 1950. Albert W. Tucker appropriated the game and formalized it by structuring the rewards in terms of prison sentences and named it "prisoner's dilemma". William Poundstone in his 1993 book ''Prisoner's Dilemma'' writes the following version:Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of speaking to or exchanging messages with the other. The police admit they don't have enough evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They plan to sentence both to two years in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the police offer each prison ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Preference Falsification
Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting a preference under perceived public pressures. It involves the selection of a publicly expressed preference that differs from the underlying privately held preference (or simply, a public preference at odds with one’s private preference). People frequently convey to each other preferences that differ from what they would communicate privately under credible cover of anonymity (such as in Opinion poll, opinion surveys to researchers or pollsters). The term preference falsification was coined by Timur Kuran in a 1987 article, "Chameleon voters and public choice." On controversial matters that induce preference falsification, he showed there, widely disliked policies may appear popular. The distribution of public preferences, which Kuran defines as public opinion, may differ greatly from private opinion, which is the distribution of private preferences known only to individuals themselves. Timur Kuran, Kuran developed the implica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prediction Market
Prediction markets (also known as betting markets, information markets, decision markets, idea futures or event derivatives) are open markets where specific outcomes can be predicted using financial incentives. Essentially, they are exchange-traded markets created for the purpose of trading the outcome of events. The market prices can indicate what the crowd thinks the probability of the event is. A prediction market contract trades between 0 and 100%. The most common form of a prediction market is a binary option market, which will expire at the price of 0 or 100%. Prediction markets can be thought of as belonging to the more general concept of crowdsourcing which is specially designed to aggregate information on particular topics of interest. The main purposes of prediction markets are eliciting aggregating beliefs over an unknown future outcome. Traders with different beliefs trade on contracts whose payoffs are related to the unknown future outcome and the market prices of th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pluralistic Ignorance
In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance refers to a situation in which the minority position on a given topic is wrongly perceived to be the majority position or where the majority position is wrongly perceived to be the minority position. This can be more simply described as "an individual who does not believe, but that individual thinks that everyone believes." Pluralistic ignorance can arise due to a number of different factors. An individual may misjudge overall perceptions of a topic due to fear, embarrassment, social desirability, or social inhibition. Any of these can lead to the individual incorrectly perceiving the proportion of the general public who share similar beliefs to oneself. As such, pluralistic ignorance can only describe the coincidence of a belief with inaccurate perceptions, but not the process to get to those inaccurate perceptions. Thus, individuals may develop pluralistic ignorance when they feel they will receive backlash on their belief as they think ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
