Centralidad sociocognitivae influencia social en la construcción de consensos.Conocimiento compartido modulado por el canal de comunicación

The shared knowledge subject in group decision making has been researched by Stasser and his colleagues. In a suggestive series of studies, Stasser demonstrated that the shared knowledge plays a critical and sometimes excessive role in determining the final group consensus (Stasser, 1992; Stasser & Titus, 1985, 1987). In his works Stasser indicates that groups often reject unshared information when they make a decision, which provoke that the shared information dominates the discussion and presses the preferences in final group consensus. Stasser and Titus (1985) called this phenomenon biased sample and it expresses that groups tend to make decisions with the little information that is well shared (they reject the unshared information) with the consequent risk for the quality of it. In the same way, it is expected that the members that show the greater degree of coincidence with the rest of them locate themselves as those of greater sociocognitive centrality and this property allows them to play a role of pivot in a group, more often than the peripheral members. Kameda, Ohtsubo, and Takezawa (1997) propose at least two reasons for this reasoning: First, as Stasser has suggested (Stasser, Vivas, Ricci y Terroni INTERDISCIPLINARIA, 2003, 20,2, 147-171 148 Taylor, & Hanna, 1989; Stasser, Stewart, & Wittenbaum, 1995), the process of social validation is the key of the information use in a group; the unshared information, which cannot be socially validated, is underutilized in groups. Secondly, the member’s degree of cognitive centrality could be related to his or her expertise or perceived reliability in a knowledge domain. The validity of these concepts has produced robust experimental evidence in consensuses making in tasks of judgments by jury. In this work we propose to explore its predictive capacity in group tasks of concatenated multiple decision making and in conditions that vary the support of communication used. Within the framework of the studies that analyze the social influence in the generation of consensuses using the notion of sociocognitive network, this work proposes to accumulate experimental evidence that collaborates to maintain the hypothesis that the cognitive central members influence significantly more to the configuration of the group product in tasks of multiple decision making concatenated and to prove that the validity of this relation is independent of the channel used. For this reason, we worked with 100 students of Psychology in a task of concatenated multiple decision, divided in two groups by condition of communication, 50 persons in the condition face to face (FTF) and 50 in the condition of computer mediated (CMC). Analysis of social networks was applied to the matrix of emitted judgments and to the communicational flow and multiple regression analysis was used to explore the predictive capacity of the sociocognitive centrality. The results obtained confirm the hypotheses that were settled down in this work. The concept of sociocognitive centrality proposed by Kameda, made operational by the coincidence degree that each agent has a priori with the remaining members of the group, is an effective predictor of the influence that this agent exerts in the configuration of the group product. The social validation of the judgments proposed in a group is closely related to the information previously shared by the group, so that the information provided by a member and that is strange to a community, is rejected or usually it is underutilized (Kameda et al., 1997; Stasser et al., 1989, 1995). The results confirm the hypothesis that the members with greater sociocognitive Centralidad cognitiva e influencia social en toma de decision INTERDISCIPLINARIA, 2003, 20,2, 147-171 149 centrality exert more influence in the group profits than the peripheral members. This relationship is verified when varying the communication channel.