Chapter 3

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Chapter 3

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Discussion Questions

1) Why does the justice system keep jury deliberations private, away from public scrutiny? Do you agree that this is important? How can the embedded systems framework help explain this?

2) Do you think it’s a good idea for jurors to do a straw poll when they first meet together in the deliberation room? Why or why not?

3) What are the strengths and weaknesses of seeking consensus in a decision-making group? When would it be appropriate to seek consensus? When would efforts to gain consensus lead to group polarization and conformity pressure?

4) What kinds of arguments do you find to be persuasive in the small groups you have been part of? What kind of “argument systems” (see pages 51-52) are influential in your life? To what extent do you draw on these argument systems when you are trying to persuade someone in your group?

Classroom Activities

1) Jury decision-making and new technology.

Ask students to read and discuss (or write a brief response paper) to this story from the New York Times about technology use and jurors: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/us/18juries.html

Why do judges control the kind of information that jurors receive?
Do you agree with the critiques of jurors using mobile computing devices to get information about the trial?  Why or why not?
How do you think technology influences the ways that groups make decisions?

2) Decision-making Consultants

Ask student groups to assume that they have been hired as communication consultants for a small community organization that wants to improve its decision making. (Instructors may want to enhance this basic scenario description with details that would fit their community’s context such as the type of group, issues they would be making decisions about, etc.) Groups should discuss the scenario and make a plan for how they would go about consulting the organization depicted in the scenario.

This could be done as an in-class activity, in which case instructors could debrief by asking groups to report out to the rest of the class. Alternately, it could be done as a homework assignment where groups are asked to turn in a written description of their workshop plan.

Scenario

A good friend of yours is a member of a community group that has major struggles with listening to new ideas and making good decisions. The leadership team recognizes that they have a problem in that the group always seems to settle on the same solutions to every problem they address. They are frustrated that their decision making never seems to go anywhere, but they don’t understand how to change what they do in order to improve their ability to solve problems and make high quality decisions. Your friend thinks that part of the problem is that the leadership team doesn’t listen enough to members who have new ideas or opinions that aren’t the same as the mainstream organization.

Using what you’ve learned about minority influence, argumentation, and group decision-making, describe what you would do to help the leaders of this organization make better decisions.

  1. Use Figure 3.3 (model of group decision making in the embedded system framework) to explain the circumstances faced by this group.
  2. What can this group do to give more credence to minority opinions?
  3. What advice would you give to group members whose perspectives are in the minority?
  4. What kind of advice would you offer to this group to help them with their decision-making processes?

3) Decision-making Practice

This activity works well after the instructor has covered material on the Functional Perspective and Decision Sequences. The gist of the activity is that student groups will discuss and issue and make a decision and other students will observe their discussion and analyze aspects of their decision making. Depending on the size of the class the instructor may choose to use a fishbowl situation where one group sits in the center and the rest of the class observes. A different way to do this is to divide students into groups of five or six, then to assign two observers to each group (in classes of 25 students that have pre-assigned groups it can work to split one group up to act as observers for the other groups).

Discussion groups should be given a problem to address and make a decision about.  I typically choose a topic that is salient in the local community by either finding a newspaper article on a controversial topic or posing a question that I know students at my institution have an opinion about (changing the drinking age, outlawing smoking in public places, improving public transportation in the local community, changing the graduation requirements to include a mandatory community service element, etc.) The group’s instructions are simply to “discuss the issue” and “make a recommendation” of what should happen.

Observers are given the “Observer Instructions” sheet (pdf). Observers should not participate in the discussion in any way. Their job is to take note of the process of the discussion and use the instruction sheet to help guide their note taking.
After the group discussions, I give the groups a chance to talk first (before the observers). I ask groups to share:

  1. What they decided
  2. How they came to their decision
  3. How well they think they followed the decision-making models provided in the textbook.

After that I ask the “observers” to talk about what they saw. It’s useful for groups to hear an outside perspective on their communication. It’s also useful to talk about the scope conditions and limits of the theory (when observers talk about what they noticed that didn’t seem to fit into the functional perspective criteria).

At the end you could ask students to look at Figure 3.2 (four different hypothetical small group decision-making sequences) and ask if any of these sequences best describe the decision making that this group engaged in. Which one? How do you know?