The Hidden Profile Effect: I learned something important about group decisions today in school.

Read this if you've ever had to do a group project in school or at work. It might be enlightening. This is all about a concept called the hidden profile. Let's say you are in a group with just one other person. Two of you. You have a decision to make; you want to figure out whether or not you should incorporate idea X into your project. Logically, you come up with all of the benefits of choosing A, and all of the drawbacks of doing it. Imagine your partner is doing the same thing.  As it turns out, you come up with 4 reasons for thinking that A is going to work in the project, and only 3 reasons why it might not work.. We will label your "pluses" as X1, X2, X3, and X4.  Your "minuses" will be Y1, Y2, and Y3.  Your partner has also finished doing their brainstorming, and has come up with a slightly different set of positive consequences for using this idea in the project. His "pluses" are X1, X2, X3, and X5. His "minuses" are entirely different from yours: Y4, Y5, and Y6.

When you converge to discuss the topic at hand, you're likely to only discuss the point of view that you like more (in this case, the positive). Same thing with your partner. You'll go through your list of ideas, and when you get to X4 your partner will say "oh yeah, I never thought of that!" In turn, you will learn from his X5.  In total, you will have 5 positive reasons for going with the idea. The tragedy here, is that between the two of you, there were 6 unique reasons NOT to do the idea, but you never discuss them. 

Why does this happen? Maybe it's because we instinctually want to be right, and so we just "jettison" all of the ideas that we have come up with that support our point of view, A.  We don't even give the lesser, "inferior" in our mind point of view a second chance. And we really should. I think a way to remedy this would be to try to discuss both sides of an idea even if you only support one of them.  It might make group projects better. Lord knows that most of us need to communicate better in tasked group settings...

I learned about this today in my interpersonal communication theory class with Dr. Charles Pavitt, a communications professor at the University of Delaware. You can read more about this at his page on Social Influence here (search for hidden profile effect).