Prescribing Agreement Improves Judgments and Decisions

Abstract

We investigated whether prescribing agreement improves the quality of judgments and decisions. Participants were first asked to provide judgments or decisions individually. Then, they either revised their initial judgments and decisions based on a partners' response, or they provided a joint judgment agreed upon with their partner. In the latter condition, we allowed for a minimal communication protocol restricted to acceptance and rejection responses to each other's proposals. In the Agreement condition, participants improved both in a cognitive (Experiment 1a) and a perceptual decision task (Experiment 1b). The cognitive task agreement allowed participants to improve above the level of accuracy achieved with revision. Surprisingly, the prescribing agreement improved the quality of the initial independent decisions. In a judgment task (Experiment 2), the prescribing agreement led to more accurate judgments because partners weighed each other's judgments more equally than in the Revision condition where they gave higher weight to their own judgments. We conclude that prescribing agreement reduces egocentric discounting bias and motivates individuals to be more accurate. These results not only demonstrate that collective benefits in judgment and decision making can be accrued without verbal communication but also suggest potential limitations of this approach.