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    The kind of group you want to belong to: effects of group structure on group accuracy

    Jönsson, M.L. and Hahn, Ulrike and Olsson, E.J. (2015) The kind of group you want to belong to: effects of group structure on group accuracy. Cognition 142 , pp. 191-204. ISSN 0010-0277.

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    Abstract

    There has been much interest in group judgment and the so-called ‘wisdom of crowds’. In many real world contexts, members of groups not only share a dependence on external sources of information, but they also communicate with one another, thus introducing correlations among their responses that can diminish collective accuracy. This has long been known, but it has—to date—not been examined to what extent different kinds of communication networks may give rise to systematically different effects on accuracy. We argue that equations that relate group accuracy, individual accuracy, and group diversity (see Hogarth, 1978; Page, 2007) are useful theoretical tools for understanding group performance in the context of research on group structure. In particular, these equations may serve to identify the kind of group structures that improve individual accuracy without thereby excessively diminishing diversity so that the net positive effect is an improvement even on the level of collective accuracy. Two experiments are reported where two structures (the complete network and a small world network) are investigated from this perspective. It is demonstrated that the more constrained network (the small world network) outperforms the network with a free flow of information.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): Wisdom of crowds, Group structure, Group accuracy, Information flow, Social networks, Group learning
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
    Research Centres and Institutes: Birkbeck Knowledge Lab
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 05 Jun 2015 07:48
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:17
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/12315

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