Creative group decision making: Groups as motivated information processors

Many everyday decision problems do not have a fixed set of decision alternatives, and creativity is needed to generate alternatives before a choice can be made. In this project it is ivestigated how social and epistemic motivation affect the processes by which group members combine their cognitive resources to come up with creative solutions. Unlike much previous research in this area, both the idea generation and the choice stage of creative decision making are studied, in groups homogenous and heterogeneous in cognitive resources. It is argued that group heterogeneity can improve the creative performance of groups, but only with high levels of epistemic motivation this leads to high quality decisions. Moreover, selfish as opposed to pro-social motivation is proposed to cause lower levels of attention to the ideas of others, and this moderates the relation between group heterogeneity and performance.