Who gains more: Experts or novices? The benefits of interaction under numerical uncertainty.

Abstract

Interacting to reach a shared decision is an omnipresent component of human collaboration. We explored the interaction between dyads of individuals with different levels of expertise. The members of the dyads completed a number line task privately, jointly and privately again. In the joint condition, dyad members shared their private estimates and then negotiated a joint estimate. Both dyad members averaged their private individual estimates to determine joint estimates, thereby showing a strong equality bias. Their performance in the joint condition exceeded the performance of the dyad's best estimator, demonstrating interaction benefit, only when the dyad members had similar levels of expertise and when the averaged dyad performance was sufficiently accurate. At the end of the task, participants rated their level and their partner's level of competence. Participants were accurate in classifying themselves as the expert or the novice within the dyad. Nevertheless, novices tended to overestimate their ability as they admitted to being less competent but only slightly worse than their expert partner. Experts, instead, believed themselves to be more competent but were humble and considered their performance only marginally better than their partner's. Overall, these results have important implications for settings in which people with different levels of expertise interact. (PsycINFO Database Record

Mental capacity assessment: a descriptive, cross-sectional study of what doctors think, know and do

“…24 The difference between novices and experts insight into their performance is well-established in other contexts so may partially explain our findings. 25 However, additional factors such as the expectations of others and external influence of colleagues and patient relatives combined with time pressure could also undermine doctors' confidence to raise doubts. These factors may lead to fears of appearing less competent which could explain the anxiety experienced.…”

The cost of coordination can exceed the benefit of collaboration in performing complex tasks

“…Based on the observation that such critical agent characteristics, particularly the relevance of prior personal knowledge (i.e., expertise), are not randomly distributed, our work builds on this line of work by directly operationalizing differences in the extent of task-relevant training between interacting individuals—in contrast to studies which have relied on proxies for fixed differences in decision experience and ability (Sella et al, 2018).…”

The cost of coordination can exceed the benefit of collaboration in performing complex tasks

“…Notably, in many studies of collective decision-making, the benefits of social influence have so far been primarily limited to numeric judgment tasks [37,38], e.g. number line estimation.…”

“…As such, it advances a "solutionoriented" approach [40] that not only aims to extend our understanding of the citizen science task under study, but directly seeks to address a common scenario faced by senior researchers or general managers: assessing whether or not to rely on a qualified expert or a pair of inexperienced team members for solving various tasks effectively; and if so, whether to provide additional selective training to one or more members. Based on the observation that critical agent characteristics, particularly the relevance of prior personal knowledge, are not randomly distributed, we directly operationalize differences in the extent of task-relevant training between interacting individuals-in contrast to studies which have relied on proxies for fixed differences in decision experience and ability [38].…”