Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Groups Shape Identity and Collective Action?
Track information held by individuals against the decision supported by all the evidence.
Why you’re reading it. Make information pooling a concrete coordination problem.
A question to consider. How would you reorganize a committee's information-sharing process, and what outcome would test your proposed explanation?
Why this reading
A group can possess enough information for a good decision without using it. This experiment separates what individual members know from what becomes available when their information is combined.
Before you read
Shared information is known by several members; unshared information is initially held by only one. A hidden profile favors a different choice when all information is pooled than when each person considers their own subset.
Read for
- Reconstruct which candidate each person's information favors and which the combined information favors.
- Compare individual preferences, group choices, and recall before and after discussion.
- Distinguish the proposed sampling mechanism from the outcomes directly measured.
Consider afterwards
- A hiring panel agrees quickly. How could you test whether agreement reflects a well-supported choice or failure to combine different evidence?
Editorial context
The study used student groups and controlled candidate descriptions. It measured choices and recall, rather than coding discussion transcripts, so its account of information sampling is an inference. A later meta-analysis examines hidden-profile performance across studies; neither work makes every instance of consensus suspect.