The Influence of Superordinate Identity on Group Decision Making through Discussion

Group decision making is always a hot topic among social psychologists. One common way of decision making for a group is through discussion. Members of a group express their own opinions on a certain subject, which might be retained or discarded in the end. Therefore, an ideal decision making through discussion is a process of assembling parts of opinions from each group member and forming an ultimate decision that everyone is satisfied with. This process itself has many factors that seem intriguing. One intriguing factor is the extent to which a member is willing to change his own original opinion in order to make compromises for the group to reach a consensus decision. This may, in a very large extent, depend on personal characteristics, e.g. if he/she is prone to self-sacrifice for collectivism. But we also assume this has something to do with the characteristic of the group. In this study, we manipulated the social identity of the groups into either a shared superordinate identity or different subgroup identities. We also manipulated the size to make it either a big (6-person) group or small group (3-person group). Using experimental methods, we found members of a superordinate identity group tended to modify more more of their own opinions through discussion, compared to those only identifying with their subgroups. Besides, members of superordinate identity groups also formed stronger identification with group decision than their subgroup peers. We also found higher member modification in bigger groups compared to smaller groups.