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Is THE performance of a group superior to the performance of an individual? Studies by Shaw (1932), Watson (1928), andTaylor andFaust (1952) have found that group performance is significantly superior. In the Taylor-Faust study (1952), for example, groups composed of two and four members were found to solve more Twenty Questions problems in fewer questions and in shorter time than did persons working individually.These studies have based their statistical analysis upon the null hypothesis that no difference exists between group and individual performance except that produced by chance. However, the results indicating that group performance is superior to individual performance have often been interpreted as due to some "group effect" in which individual members of the group are influenced by other members to work on problems along lines of thought which they would not have generated themselves. Marquart (1955) has criticized the validity of such an interpretation in which a person working alone is counted as equal to one group and in which no allowance is made for the fact that a group solution might be the result of any one of the members (perhaps the ablest) rather than the cooperative effort of the group as a whole.A different null hypothesis and one more appropriate for testing the influence of some group effects can be derived from the discrete

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