Newcomers and the Innovative Group Process

An Experimental Investigation of Convergence in Collaborative Problem Solving

Hayashi, Yugo

College of Comprehensive Psychology, Ritsumeikan University

All dependent variables or measures analyzed for this article’s research question have been reported in the Method section. All levels of all independent variables and all predictors or manipulations, whether successful or failed, have been reported in the Method section. The total number of excluded observations and the rationale for them have been reported in the Method section.

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 20K20873. The author declares no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or publication of this article.

Yugo Hayashi contributed to all aspects of the study.

Yugo Hayashi, College of Comprehensive Psychology, Ritsumeikan University, 2-150 Iwakura-cho, Ibaraki, Osaka 567-8570, Japan [email protected]

Received January 26, 2022

revised December 22, 2022

Accepted January 7, 2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 49(11):p 1786-1798, November 2023. | DOI: 10.1037/xlm0001232

During collaborative small group problem-solving, a group member with a minority perspective has a notable influence on the majority’s perspective. However, the type of interactions with such a member could influence a stalemate, and the relationships between internal and task conflicts and the convergence process remain unclear. This study comprised two experiments focusing on the influence of minorities who act as “newcomers” among 231 university psychology majors. Using multiple conversational agents as the experimental tools, Experiment 1 revealed that a newcomer who presents a new perspective promotes the majority’s perspective change, compared to when such a member has been in the group from the beginning. Experiment 2 demonstrated that such an effect occurs when most of the internal conflict and the task phase facilitated the newcomers’ influence. The findings indicated that the minority member advantage increases when they are a newcomer; thus, they have a stronger influence on the perspective-taking process. The same effect occurs when the newcomer intervenes in majority task conflicts and internal cognitive loads. Thus, this study provides new implications for research on minority influence in laboratory experiments using virtual agents for small-group studies.