The impact of social interaction on performance of decision tasks of varying complexity

This study investigated empirically the value of social interaction in promoting people's working knowledge and performance in decision-making. The results indicate that social interaction was highly beneficial for enhancing people's knowledge and performance of complex decision tasks. However, the results indicate that social interaction made no difference to people's performance of simple decision tasks. These findings make two important contributions to the development of theory: they support the contingent nature of social interaction effects on decision making knowledge and performance, and identify component task complexitity as an important contingent factor.