Decision making in groups

Have you ever stood together on the street without knowing where to go next or eat?

That is a quite hard communication problem, as all participants need to communicate their preferences and commit to a decision. The problem often is that there is no leader in the group who manages this process and people often do not communicate their preferences or have none at all.

This often results from the lack of meaning in such decisions - I did not care enough to make a decision (where to go next or where to eat), so I waited for others to see if they care more, to make a decision about where to eat. In praxis the decision-driving factor is time (for example as everybody is quite hungry). We, therefore, have some kind of time-based consensus, which generally works quite well for people and is the core concept of the game “The Mind” - pretty cool simple game. In this game the time-based consensus is practiced by trying to let everyone find the right time to play its number.

So basically everyone has some kind of priorities but weights them differently.

Utilitarism

Further explanation of this reminded me of applied Utilitarism, where you maximize the overall benefit by summarizing all gains and losses of a group to find the best decision. But unlike the Benthamsche Kalkül, it is not useful to ask everybody for the hypothetical value of all gains or losses and calculate such a decision. Just waiting is practically enough in most cases - whoever has a large gain or loss from a decision says so while people with a small preference remain silent as they don’t care that much about the decision. If no one cares, the importance of such small values will increase over time and someone will make a decision.

Group dynamics

Of course, this does not work well for people who are not used to voice their expression or have a misaligned timing. Some might directly communicate their smaller intentions and try to put these onto a group quite heavy. While others do have weightful own priorities (or ideas where to go) but do not voice them enough, to not force their decision onto others.

I tend to see that groups which have a good feeling of decision making, timing and assessment of priorities have a good group dynamic, while it gets quite hard if this is not the case. The key is to try to communicate their preferences with priority correctly.

So if you generally tend to do the decisions in a group, you might want to try to evaluate a little longer and have others voice an idea/priority. And if you generally tend to wait for others and don’t voice preferences, you might try to reevaluate if you are not taking yourself back too much. Also being more verbose with the wieght of a decision is a good way to add another factor than just time :)

All in all, it is about the right balance - as always.