Information sharing as story construction in group decision making

Prior research in group decision-making has shown that group members tend to share and focus on the information that is known to the majority of the group but keep the unique information unshared. Tasks created to study this information pooling phenomenon are referred to as hidden profile tasks. A recent hidden profile experiment showed that group members constructed stories to reach their group decision. The study discouraged this storytelling approach and suggested that technology mediation could provide a way to reduce the likelihood of using this approach in discussion. While our experiment confirmed this story construction approach, we found that in the story construction process the participants considered the important arguments as well as different perspectives. We therefore suggest that the story development approach is rational and that the Story model, an existing group process model well-documented in jury decision making literature, could shed light on the design of collaborative technologies that accommodate or improve such a discussion approach.