08:30 - 10:00
Mon-A7-Talk I-
Mon-Talk I-
Room: A7
Chair/s:
Maren Mayer
When making decisions, individuals often receive advice from others and incorporate this advice into their own judgments and decisions-under certain conditions leading to increases in decision quality and confidence. Beyond the typical paradigm examining advice-based decisions, several research avenues emerged in recent years that rely on advice taking and extend the typical paradigm to various different tasks and contexts. In this symposium, we thus introduce several novel directions for advice taking and related research. The first contribution provides an overview of typical paradigms and findings of empirical studies on advice-based decisions conducted over the last 15 years in behavioral and organizational research. The second contribution describes a newly developed (largely) culture-fair estimation task that solely requires secondary school level as a basis for conducting between-culture comparisons of advice taking in Chinese and German students. The third talk will present an application of the advice taking paradigm to investigate social influence in moral judgments at the example of the asymmetric moral conformity effect. The fourth contribution addresses sequential collaboration, a process relying on consecutively improving contributions made by others in which previous contributions can be viewed as advice for later contributors. Some of the previous findings will be reassessed to complement the presentation of a novel statistical modeling approach for process-consistent analysis of judgment formation in part five. The final contribution addresses how people update their beliefs about the validity of effects when being confronted with various scientific evidence, which can be viewed as a form of advice.
Sequential collaboration: Aggregating judgments in a dependent, incremental manner
Mon-A7-Talk I-04
Presented by: Maren Mayer
Maren Mayer 1, Daniel W. Heck 2
1 Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien, Tübingen, 2 Universität Marburg
In recent years, the Internet has become a popular source for gathering and collecting information, especially in online collaborative projects such as Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap. In these projects, collaboration resembles a sequential chain that starts with the creation of an entry followed by a sequence of contributors deciding to adjust or maintain the presented information. As online collaborative projects were found to yield highly accurate information which is often attributed to wisdom of crowds, we examine this sequential collaboration as a process of judgment aggregation. Thereby, sequential collaboration resembles advice taking since contributors encounter judgments of previous participants before deciding whether to adjust or maintain these judgments. In three experiments, comparing judgment aggregation with sequential collaboration and the unweighted averaging of independent individual judgments, we found that judgment accuracy in sequential collaboration increases over a sequential chain and that sequential-collaboration estimates can be more accurate than estimates obtained with unweighted averaging. By allowing contributors to opt-out of providing a judgment, sequential collaboration may foster an implicit weighting of judgments by expertise such that contributors adjust or maintain judgments according to their expertise. We investigated this in three experiments measuring and manipulating contributors' expertise. There we showed that experts improve judgments more than novices resulting in more accurate estimate the more and later experts enter sequential chains. These results yield first insights into sequential collaboration as a mechanism of judgment aggregation and show that advice taking in the context of sequential collaboration works to the benefit of the resulting judgments.
Keywords: wisdom of crowds, group decision making, mass collaboration