Exam 9: Defective Group Decision Making and Problem Solving

A friend of yours has joined a controversial doomsday group headed by an individual who claims to be a prophet with divine powers. The head of this group predicts that the world will end on Christmas Eve. When this prophecy proves to be wrong, the explanation provided by the head of the group claims, "This was just a dress rehearsal for the real thing-testing your faith." This is

Advances in electronic technology have made a bias for speed; faster is not only possible but expected.

You're the leader of the Interstellar Dark Beer Drinking Doomsday cult. You predict that the world will end when consumption of dark beer declines by 5% or more in a year. Consumption declines 7%, but the world does not end. When this fact is pointed out to you, your response is, "Members of the IDBDD drank mass quantities of dark beer, so they saved the world from extinction, proving the validity of my teachings." This is an example of

Which of the following is a consequence of information overload?

A correlation is

A perceptual mindset is fundamentally a problem of information overload.

A glut of information makes it very difficult to ascertain useless from useful information.

Group polarization is manifested when the points of view and opinions among a group's members become more divergent (differ from each other).

Faulty inferential leaps are more likely when the issues are emotionally charged.

Information overload occurs when the rate of information flow into a system exceeds the system's processing capacity.

Groupthink is a decision-making process in which members think deeply about potential errors that might produce faulty decision making.

Confirmation bias is the psychological predisposition to

We tend to overvalue vivid, concrete information when making decisions.

Group discussion promotes higher quality decision making when

A group has to display all the symptoms of groupthink in order to experience the poor-quality decisions that accompany groupthink.

Specialization is a pattern recognition means of screening information in order to cope with information overload.

A false dichotomy is either-or thinking where we view the world in terms of opposites when clearly there are more than two opposing possibilities.

Which of the following is a valid statement about correlations?

A consistent relationship between two variables is called a dichotomy.

Inferences