Small groups, today, is ubiquitous and becoming a substantial part of people’s work lives. Many organizations have put their effort to find how to make the group running successfully and how to make the group interactions more productive. Sometimes, group dynamics can contribute to the failure and worse judgments. Surowiecki (2004) said that “instead of making people wiser, being in a group can actually make them dumber” (p. 441). So as to make every member thinks smarter and works together effectively, avoiding important pitfalls is the best ways to reach those goals.
First of all, confirmation bias should be avoided in order to make a small group work well. If members in the group gather information selectively or interpret evidence in a biased way, consequential mistakes might be occurred. Garold Stasser, social psychologist, performed an interesting experiment about confirmation bias by setting a group of eight people in order to request them to evaluate the psychology students’ performance. He gave two pieces of students’ information to every member in the team; additionally, two members received two more pieces of information, and only one member was given another two. Stasser found that even if there were six pieces of helpful information, this group used just two of them that each member similarly had for their discussions and dismissed the four extra details (as cited in Surowiecki, p. 445-446). In other words, the decisions about the performance of students which were made from this group were entirely based on a very limited supply of analysis and information since they did not consider all evidence equally. Confirmation bias is also relevant to the action that people in a group try to interpret information in a way that confirms their conclusion. This means that the group do not begin discussion with information, otherwise they start with conclusion or assumption that already been answered. To avoid this kind of situations, members in a small...