Four Failures of Deliberating Groups

33 Pages Posted: 18 Apr 2008

See all articles by Cass R. Sunstein

Cass R. Sunstein

Harvard Law School; Harvard University - Harvard Kennedy School (HKS)

Reid Hastie

University of Chicago - Booth School of Business

Date Written: April 2008

Abstract

Many groups make their decisions through some process of deliberation, usually with the belief that deliberation will improve judgments and predictions. But deliberating groups often fail, in the sense that they make judgments that are false or that fail to take advantage of the information that their members have. There are four such failures. (1) Sometimes the predeliberation errors of group members are amplified, not merely propagated, as a result of deliberation. (2) Groups may fall victim to cascade effects, as the judgments of initial speakers or actors are followed by their successors, who do not disclose what they know. Nondisclosure, on the part of those successors, may be a product of either informational or reputational cascades. (3) As a result of group polarization, groups often end up in a more extreme position in line with their predeliberation tendencies. Sometimes group polarization leads in desirable directions, but there is no assurance to this effect. (4) In deliberating groups, shared information often dominates or crowds out unshared information, ensuring that groups do not learn what their members know. All four errors can be explained by reference to informational signals, reputational pressure, or both. A disturbing result is that many deliberating groups do not improve on, and sometimes do worse than, the predeliberation judgments of their average or median member.

Keywords: deliberation, cascades, group polarization, hidden profiles

Suggested Citation

Sunstein, Cass R. and Hastie, Reid, Four Failures of Deliberating Groups (April 2008). U of Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 401, U of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 215, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1121400 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1121400

Cass R. Sunstein (Contact Author)

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Harvard University - Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) ( email )

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Reid Hastie

University of Chicago - Booth School of Business ( email )

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Chicago, IL 60637
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