ABSTRACT
In 1932, Marjorie Shaw published a study that compared individual and group problem-solving performance. Her results, often replicated (see Davis, 1969, and Steiner, 1972, for reviews), demonstrated that groups are better problem solvers than individuals. Shaw attributed this, at least in part, to the ability of groups to check errors. Although later work with mathematical models of group performance showed that an error-checking assumption was not necessary to explain the superior performance of groups (Lorge & Solomon, 1955), the idea of groups as error checkers has remained salient in the literature on groups (see Shaw, 1981) and has recently received some empirical support for groups working on tasks concerning legal decisions (Hastie, Penrod, & Pennington, 1983) and memory performance (Hinsz, 1990; Tindale & Sheffey, 1988). However, very little is currently known about how and when groups will help to correct individual-level errors.
