Improving the Delphi process: Lessons from social psychological research

By Fergus Bolger, George Wright. 2011

198 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Delphi technique was largely developed to avoid the problems of freely interacting groups such as dominant individuals and pressure to conform to the majority view. Our review of the social psychological literature reveals some obstacles to Delphi achieving its full potential relative to other cheaper and easier methods of aggregating judgment. We identify residual normative and informational pressures towards consensus that potentially reduce process gain that might otherwise be achieved. For instance, panelist confidence may act as a signal of status rather than be a valid cue to expertise, whereas consensus appears to have a strong influence on the final outcome that can reduce its accuracy when there are valid minority opinions. We argue that process gain in Delphi must occur through those further from the "truth" changing their opinion more than those closer to the truth, with the general direction of opinion change being towards the truth. For such virtuous opinion change to occur we suggest the need to both facilitate opinion change and provide good cues as to where the truth lies. Research on Judge Advisor Systems shows that people usually do not change their opinion as much as they should, giving too much weight to their own opinion and too little to the views of others—this bias can be reduced by increasing involvement and motivation. In addition, we propose that the best way to provide good cues as to the direction of the truth is to elicit rich reasoning from panelists about the judgment or choice in question, then use this as feedback. We suggest practical ways of focusing and deepening panelists’ consideration and evaluation of such reasoning—such that all proffered opinions are well-evaluated. Additionally, we propose a model of opinion change in Delphi for use as a paradigm for future process-orientated research.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f3242905f1b9ee4b08b4c6a26605b9b346cc83a7

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In Social Psychology

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Identifying key knowledge needs for evidence‐based conservation of wild insect pollinators: a collaborative cross‐sectoral exercise (2013, background): “Including as wide a range of interests as possible in the group has been demonstrated by social psychologists to be important for eliciting expert judgement effectively (Yaniv, 2011; Bolger & Wright, 2011; Hussler et al., 2011).”
The Delphi technique: Past, present, and future prospects — Introduction to the special issue☆ (2011, background): “In doing this, the authors follow the empirical framework already discussed by Bolger and Wright [3] and noted earlier.”