An exploration into the influence of psychological profiles upon group decision making

This paper looks at a problem where a group, made up of individuals from a variety of different organisations but with similar technical backgrounds, had the task of producing a forecast for their particular industry. The forecast was to be published by their technical institute and was therefore of general interest in stimulating debate. The group members used a form of judgemental modelling to produce their individual forecasts. After these initial outcomes, the group was split into three sub-groups based upon a method of psychological profiling, with each subgroup repeating the exercise and producing a group-negotiated forecast. The results presented here show how group composition affects the way in which individuals negotiate towards a final outcome. The conclusions reached have implications for decision making aids using decision support systems, both for systems that aim to facilitate and for those that attempt to model the process. Although only a small experiment, the results suggest that there is tremendous potential benefit from this avenue of research when applied to the developing technologies of group decision and negotiation systems.