No abstract

The claim that a group's communication plays a significant role in the outcomes of its discussion presupposes that the members of the group were in actuality communicating with one another; in other words, they were conducting a coherent discussion. Past research attempting to relate discussion and outcomes has almost universally failed to test this presumption. The present study indicates that a sample of 62 groups met quantitative criteria on both the group and individual level for coherent discussion and thus can be presumed to be engaging in communication.

The first goal of this article is to demonstrate that the dichotomy between informational and normative influence in group decision making is long outdated and should be replaced with a distinction among compliance, comparison, and argumentation influence processes. The second goal of this article is to use this distinction as the basis for a literature review of the impact of various input factors on social influence during small group discussion. The third goal of this article is to present the Simplified Model of Group Social Influence Processes, an interactive input–process–output model relevant to decision-making groups. The article ends with a discussion of the implications of this model for future research and further model development.

The response of groups to the experience of coping with resource dilemmas has been an object of study by scholars in several of the social and behavioral sciences. Social norms, trust, and the perception of group identity form cooperative mechanisms critical to group cooperation. However, the opportunity to communicate has been singled out as the most important factor influencing group cooperation performance in resource dilemmas. Until recently, the content of that communication has undergone little examination. This article examines the relationships among topical and functional communication content, group performance, and participant perceptions of cooperative mechanisms in 97 experimental simulation groups. Detailed discussion of specific strategies was positively related, and discussion of general strategy, basic information exchange, and recapitulation of past occurrences in the simulation were negatively related to both amount of harvest from the resource pool and participant perceptions of equality norm emergence, trust, and group identity formation, among others. These perceptions were positively related with both the total amount and within-group equality of harvest.

Functional theory is theory in which the central core includes a description of attributes that lead to good consequencesfor, and/or that satisfy agoal of, a system or the system's designer or user. The application of functional theory to small group discussion requires the theorist to make two types of theoretical commitments. First, functional theories should include scientific functional explanations. Second, finctional theories should include a description of necessary discussionfunctions on one and only one level of abstraction. Three well-known functional approaches to group discussion, those of Benne and Sheats, Bales, and Hirokawa, are described, and the two commitment requirements are applied to these approaches. All three approaches are shown to contain incomplete explanations and to describe functions on different levels of abstraction.