The Social Influence of Confidence in Group Decision Making

This study investigates the relation between an individual's self-reported confidence and his or her influence within a freely interacting group. Each participant chose responses and provided confidence assessments for choice items of a variety of task types, first as an individual and a second time as a member of a pentad, a member of a dyad, or an individual. The influence of a particular faction within a group was greater if its members were more confident. A participant's response accuracy was related to both greater confidence and greater influence to the extent that the task fell on the intellective end of the intellective-judgmental continuum of task types. As a result, the extent to which group members' confidence predicted their influence was also greatest on intellective rather than judgmental tasks. Results further illustrate that adding group members to work on a problem may increase overconfidence on judgmental tasks but decrease overconfidence on intellective tasks.