When What You KnowCanHurt You: A Study of Experiential Effects on Group Discussion and Performance

Abstract This study compares several mechanisms that might affect the tendency of groups to focus on common rather than uniquely held information. It uses this framework to investigate how this discussion bias and, ultimately, task performance might change as groups initially gain experience with the team and/or task. Groups with both task and team experience were found to display alargerbias toward discussing common information and achievelowertask performance than groups with only task experience, only team experience, or neither task nor team experience. Increases in the discussion bias were also found tolowertask scores. Finally, even when all items of information (both common and unique) were mentioned (and regardless of the experience gained), delays in mentioning the first unique item of information were found to significantlylowerperformance.

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