The Influence Of Information Availability On Self-Evaluation In Group Tasks

Individuals tend to overestimate their relative contribution to collaborative endeavors.Thus, the sum of group members estimates of the percentage they each contributed to ajoint task typically exceeds the logically allowable 100%. Support Theory suggests thatthis tendency stems partly from individuals' inclination to regard their fellow groupmembers as a collective rather than as individuals, and that leading people to think abouttheir collaborators as individuals should therefore reduce the perceived relativemagnitude of their own contributions. Consistent with this theory, our six experimentsdemonstrate that people's tendency to claim more than their fair share of the credit for agroup task is attenuated when they "unpack" their collaborators, that's to say, when theyare presented with the more detailed descriptions of others.In this study, we also explore the mechanism of the Unpacking Effect by introducingthe concept of Information Availability into our study. These six experiments indicate thatthe Unpacking Effect occurs partly due to the activation of their collaborators' detaileddescriptions by the unpacking message, conceptualizing them as separate individuals,rather than as the rest of the group, and thus in turn reduces their shares in theself-evaluation. Further analyses also demonstrate that when the unpacking message isirrelevant to an individual, that is to say, the message fails to activate the informationabout others, the unpacking effect would not take place any more.A conclusion could be drawn that information availability plays a key role inself-evaluation.