Are more heads more motivated than one? The role of communication in group belief updating

Lata Gangadharan (), Philip J. Grossman () and Nina Xue ()
Additional contact information
Lata Gangadharan: Department of Economics, Monash University
Philip J. Grossman: Department of Economics, Monash University
Nina Xue: Department of Economics, Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU)

Department of Economics Working Papers from Vienna University of Economics and Business, Department of Economics

Abstract: Many decisions are made by groups under uncertainty, with beliefs playing a critical role. However, less is known about how groups, often driven by self-serving motivations, aggregate these beliefs. In an experiment, we examine how groups form and update beliefs following communication and compare these to individual beliefs. We find that beliefs do not differ initially, however, group deliberation facilitates more motivated updating as groups become more pessimistic and less accurate than individuals over time. Text analyses reveal that groups with stronger self-serving motives send a larger volume of messages and are less likely to be anchored by initial proposals.

Keywords: belief updating; group decision making; self-serving bias; communication; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C92 D23 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-12
Note: PDF Document
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://research.wu.ac.at/ws/portalfiles/portal/80177634/WP388.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wiw:wiwwuw:wuwp388

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics Working Papers from Vienna University of Economics and Business, Department of Economics Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Department of Economics ().