Cognitive Tools for Group Decision Making

Abstract

This chapter combines the use of cognitive mapping and the repertory grid technique in a socio-organizational perspective and in a problem-solving oriented approach, so as to avoid some recurrent trappings of decision making such as biased goal-oriented behaviour and misleading perceptions of the task environment. The approach requires that a group of people facing a forthcoming choice are randomly split up into three sub-groups of nearly the same number. Subjects in the first sub-group are interviewed about their representation of the problem setting and on potential strategies. In this preliminary step the interviewer, after building up the resulting individual cognitive maps, extracts and codes the main recurrent concepts (“states of the world”). These concepts are used for an evaluation of the task environment by the second sub-group, whose subjects use the repertory grid technique. Individuals are shown how to express their viewpoint in terms of “constructs”, which are theoretical abstractions for exploring concepts or real events. The repertory grids elicited provide the building blocks for the final phase of the approach, assigned to the third sub-group. This group is required to generate feasible alternatives for targets derived from grid evidence by exploiting the “province of meaning” through a very simple diagrammatic scheme. The entire approach, which represents a narrow method where each step is linked to the following one, is discussed by making references to the results of a pilot experiment.