Practical: Group Decisions

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Decisions are omnipresent in our lives, and many of the most crucial decisions are made in groups. Medical teams diagnose patients’ illnesses, emergency teams decide on the best approach to deal with an incident, and management teams make important investment decisions. Each member of a decision making group often contributes specific information and has his or her own perspective on the decision problem. The goals of this project are to experience the challenges and hindrances of decision making when members have diverse information and to scientifically investigate factors that contribute towards successful group decision making. The practical consists of two parts: 1) a group decision making exercise and 2) a short report including analyses of the data gathered during these exercises. During the exercise, students will play the role of a fire brigade commander, police officer, or environmental expert and make decisions as a member of an emergency management team. During this session, data will be collected on a number of group variables (e.g. leadership, personality, communication.) After all students have participated, they will receive an anonymous version of the dataset containing data on all teams. Based on this dataset, each student must build a model containing two or three variables, which he/she thinks will predict team performance, and subsequently use SPSS to analyse the proposed relations. The model and results should be described in a short report.