Understanding Groupthink

Groups benefit most when minority voices are heard and conflicts are minimised, says Assistant Professor Grace Park Guihyun from the SMU School of Social Sciences.

Back to Research@SMU Issue 18

Photo Credit: Cyril Ng

By Yamini Chinnuswamy

SMU Office of Research (16 Sep 2014) – It’s difficult to escape group work, whether it is for something as small as a school research project, or a larger company effort. The assumption by many is that working as a group is superior to working individually, perhaps because groups have a larger information pool to work with. However, this line of thinking doesn’t square with research data, according to Assistant Professor Grace Park Guihyun from the Singapore Management University (SMU) School of Social Sciences.

“Research on group performance and productivity has shown that groups often fail to utilise such potential benefits, and end up performing at a sub-optimal level,” she says.

When she was a postgraduate student, Professor Park observed that even a group of intelligent researchers could make poor-quality decisions. “I attended research meetings with famous faculty members, talented academics and competent research associates. During those meetings, we made decisions collectively, but we later found out that none of us actually liked the decisions!”

“When asked, people didn’t object initially because they had thought everyone else wanted those decisions. But it turned out that no one liked them. In the end, we all wondered: if this was the case, why did we allow the decisions to go through?” she notes.

The importance of listening to the minority

Spurred by her personal experiences, Professor Park has turned to research to dissect the group decision making process.

In one focus group study, she constructed a scenario where groups of three individuals had to conduct X-ray checks on luggage in an airport setting. The three participants were required to make decisions collectively as to whether or not they should search a piece of luggage for dangerous items. The pressure of  having a snaking queue of travellers deterred the teams from being overly cautious and searching all the bags.

“Essentially, the group had to strike a balance between searching the bags and clearing them. I observed that sometimes, there would be a minority member who had different opinions—for example, two people might choose to clear the luggage, while the other person would request for a search. In this situation, the majority would sometimes listen to the third individual and seek the reason why. But sometimes, the majority would simply ignore the minority, and the minority would turn out to be correct!”

Professor Park explains that simply listening to different opinions—regardless of the popularity of said opinions—and talking through decisions, can be a great boon to group efficiency. Indeed, previous research has found that even listening to minority opinions which are completely wrong can be beneficial.

“In my study, it seemed that whenever the group majority took time to listen to the minority, they made stronger decisions collectively,” she says. “Acknowledging different opinions forces a group to think and talk through its decisions, thus achieving better understanding. By developing a more holistic perspective on the matter, the group is better equipped to make a decision.”

Unravelling group processes

Another project that Professor Park is initiating with a collaborator from the Nanyang Technological University will see her observing school project teams over a one-year period.

“We intend to have students carry out group projects, with the hope that they will learn better by collaborating with others. Because of poor group dynamics, students often end up neglecting group work and learn very little beyond what they would as individuals,” she says. “By teaching them how to manage group processes, they will learn to avoid common mistakes such as not listening to minority opinions, and ultimately make better decisions.”

Professor Park observes that good team dynamics begin with achieving the optimal level of trust within the group, because groups that lack trust among members are more likely to see only the negative consequences of participating in group projects. This lack of trust, she says, will curtail the members’ personal motivation for completing the project.

Conversely, she warns that placing too much trust in fellow members could also hamper the group process, as it may lead to social loafing, a phenomenon where people exert less effort when working in a group versus when they work alone.

Reducing inter-group conflicts

One of Professor Park’s findings, based on her doctoral dissertation, has provided insights into team-level competitiveness and inter-group conflicts. This study saw participants involved in an iterated “Prisoner’s dilemma” experiment, either in groups of three or as individuals. In this game, groups were given the opportunity to either cooperate with or betray each other. Each option had various benefits and consequences.

“I found that team members were much more likely to lie and break their promises to each other, even though they knew that they had to interact with each other in multiple rounds, and that cooperation would have been more logical,” she says. “These observations echo what we see at an international level where countries need to maintain long-term relationships with other nations, yet inter-country tensions still arise.”

Based on these observations, Professor Park came up with solutions to encourage cooperation between different groups. “One possibility was to encourage the teams to have a more balanced discussion of both cooperative and competitive opinions during group discussions. The other was to encourage cooperation by having the most cooperation-oriented group member speak first during group discussions,” she shares. As both solutions appeared to reduce intergroup competitiveness significantly, Professor Park suggests that applying this to an international scale may achieve similar effects.

In the future, she hopes to see more process-oriented group research on organisations. She observes that current research merely studies individuals in groups, with little or no focus on how they combine to form the whole. She also hopes to apply her research to a large student pool. Given that SMU promotes group work among its students, she notes that there are numerous opportunities to not only better understand the group decision making process, but to also teach the students to better manage team dynamics.

“We can compare group performances and correlate them with the members’ intelligence, or we can measure the groups’ overall creativity and correlate it with the members’ personalities. But we need to acknowledge that there are multiple ways to get to performance and creativity, and that different groups may go through different processes,” she concludes.

Back to Research@SMU Issue 18