A Framework of a Computerized Decision Aid to Improve Group Judgments

In organizations, groups of decision makers often meet to make judgments as a group on issues and tasks such as, hiring a person who best fits an open position. In such tasks called cognitive conflict tasks, where there is no conflict of interest, group members attempting to reach a common solution often differ on their perspectives to the problem. Cognitive conflicts have been studied in the context of Social Judgment Theory, which posits that persons or judges make a set of judgments about a set of events based on observation of a set of cues related to the events. Disagreement arises because the judges fail to understand each other’s judgment making policies. In order to reduce disagreement and move the group towards a group judgment policy that has the consensus of the group members and is applied consistently, a computerized decision aid is proposed that can be built around a Group Support System using cognitive mapping as a method of providing cognitive feedback and the Analytic Hierarchy Process to process the conflicting criteria and help an individual formulate a judgment policy, as well as aggregate the individual policies into a group judgment policy. It is argued that such as decision aid by supporting every decision maker in the group to effectively use information about the task so that they have a good understanding of the judgment policy they form, to communicate their evaluation policies accurately to other members, and by providing an iterative mechanism through which members can arrive at a compromise solution to the task, is expected to improve the quality of group judgments.