Intelligence Analysis Behavioral and Social Scientific Foundations (2011) / Chapter Skim
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8 Group Processes in Intelligence Analysis--Reid Hastie
8 Group Processes in Intelligence Analysis--Reid Hastie
Pages 169-196
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. To idealize some role assignments, analysts occupy an organizational niche located between collectors and policy makers.
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The typical product of an analysis is a written document that describes the conditions in a politically significant situation, sometimes with evaluations of more than one interpretation of the true situation. The best known products of American intelligence analysis, the President's Daily Brief and National Intelligence Estimates, often look like news reports.
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WHAT IS DISTINCTIVE ABOUT INTELLIgENCE ANALYSIS? Of course, these dimensions also describe aspects of many other important team performance situations in business, science, and government settings.
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I will restrict the discussion to tasks for which the goal is to achieve the highest possible levels of accuracy in describing or forecasting a state of the external world. Our knowledge of how teams perform such tasks comes from all of the social sciences, sociology, social psychology, economics, political science, and anthropology as well as from composite fields of study, such as management science and cognitive science, although social psychology is the primary source for the current conclusions about truth-seeking group judgments.
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BREAKINg THE OVERARCHINg ANALYTIC TASK INTO SUBTASKS Each of these four conditions is essential for teams performing any task, but the specific manner in which each is accomplished depends on the task type. Each of the analytic tasks -- integration, detection, and problem solving -- can be described in terms of a stylized process model that breaks the larger task down into its component subtasks.
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Judgment and simple estimation tasks can be described as an ideal analytic process in terms of five component activities: Subtask 1, define the problem; Subtask 2, acquire relevant information; Subtask 3, terminate the information acquisition process; Subtask 4, integrate the information into a summary statement (estimate of a state of the past, present, or future world; descriptive summary report) ; and Subtask 5, generate an appropriate response (see Hinsz et al., 1997, for a similar discussion of "groups as information processors"; see Lee and Cummins, 2004, for a similar task analysis)
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must be less diverse than larger teams. Part of the paradox arises from the fact that larger teams have more resources of all types than smaller teams, but larger teams also suffer from more "process losses" than smaller teams (Steiner, 1972)
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, especially in performing tasks that involve information seeking, information evaluation, and creative thinking. But they also conclude that social diversity inevitably increases process losses through interpersonal conflict, communication problems, and lowered cohesion.
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Subtask 2: Information Acquisition The second subtask, information acquisition, is the one for which independence and diversity of perspectives count the most. Team judgments have two major advantages (compared to individual judgments)
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One method is to cycle between independent individual analysis and social interaction, and to have individuals acquire information separately; or in the case of pooling, each individual should pool information separately. The best practice is to start independently, share ideas, then return to independent search or generation, then back to social interaction.
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This creates a strong cognitive bias toward confirmatory thinking, and many naïve teams begin discussion by eliminating the correct solution because, after all, no individual member believes it might be the solution. Intelligence analysis, which involves many verified cases in which one party attempts to deceive another party by seeding communications with false and misleading information, represents one situation in which the diabolical forms of "hidden profiles" occur in naturally occurring contexts (others are cases of corporate strategic deception and some personnel matters in which individuals attempt to deceive others about professional qualifications)
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For example, when members are both acquiring and sharing information and proposing answers to the current problem or estimate, the acquisition process is undermined by confirmatory thinking, and sharing disconfirming information is inhibited. Several social procedures can increase the chances that a team will solve a hidden profiles problem.
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From page 181... ...
If the product is a summary report, the process usually takes the form of drafting a written document, often with subpart assignments to member subject matter experts, followed by discussion to combine the pieces into a unitary product. Assuming that information acquisition and pooling have been executed effectively, information integration is best served by vigorous discussion and debate.
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From page 182... ...
information acquisition and pooling process; third, emphasis on data-driven analysis and dispute resolution; fourth, well-defined role assignments so it is always clear how discussion will proceed and how contingent decisions will be made; and finally, a willingness to decide with dissent or based on "consensus with qualification." Of course, group facilitation techniques, where one member focuses mostly on promoting an effective process (and is usually disengaged from substantive contributions) , are helpful, even simply requiring a team to pause and deliberately plan a process (Larson et al., 1996)
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[a] group think dynamic led intelligence community analysts, collectors, and managers to both interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD [weapons of mass destruction]
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. Good leaders seem to anticipate the problem and design team processes to avoid it, especially at the earliest stages of performance when selecting members and instilling a "team culture" (e.g., Goodwin, 2005)
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However, this study does not actually demonstrate relative overconfidence because groups were also more likely to be correct, so the higher confidence ratings might represent the same degree of calibration as for individuals. (Furthermore, participants answered individually and then in small groups in all experimental conditions.
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Nonetheless, the notion of a shared mental model and practices that will support effective mental representations of "the team" seem to be an important element of any effort to improve team performance. For example, Mathieu et al.
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, increasing over time on the task. The most tangible advice, based on the notion that enhancing shared mental models will improve team performance, is the suggestion to train teammates together (Hollingshead, 1998; Moreland and Myaskovsky, 2000)
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provide a "soft" evaluation that concludes that prediction markets and the Delphi Method perform at comparable levels of accuracy. Following the negative public reaction to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency–sponsored Policy Analysis Market, the use of prediction markets in government agencies has been reduced, but not eliminated.
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The best advice is to begin by analyzing the task, breaking it down into subtasks, and then figuring out what properties of the team process are demanded by the subtasks. Below are two additional subtask breakdowns for the next most commonly performed analytic tasks.
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Ideally, when a team completes a task (e.g., by successfully executing the five subtasks that compose an information integration estimation task) , a final subtask would be executed to evaluate the team's achievements and to extract lessons at the team and individual levels to improve future performance.
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Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 37:219–253.
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cross-level model of motivation in teams. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 101(1)
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Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 80(1)
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Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 82(1)
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Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 47(1)
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Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 73(2–3)
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