Group Dynamics: How are decisions made in groups?
This is the eleventh lecture in a series of senior level undergraduate lectures on group dynamics that I created and have been teaching for many years. Decision making in groups has been shown to be far superior to those made by individuals. We have more perspectives, more collective knowledge and more diversity of opinion when we discuss possible courses of actions in groups. We'll explore how these decision making processes unfold in group settings and what kind of things can go wrong. Most importantly we'll discuss group think and group polarization and how poor decisions can be the result of intense pressures to conform and pressures to not speak your mind. This lecture was edited to remove personal information and student questions (I do not have permission from students to include their responses in a published forum).