Motivated Information Processing in Group Judgment and Decision Making

This article expands the view of groups as information processors into a motivated information processing in groups (MIP-G) model by emphasizing, first, the mixed-motive structure of many group tasks and, second, the idea that individuals engage in more or less deliberate information search and processing. The MIP-G model postulates that social motivation drives the kind of information group members attend to, encode, and retrieve and that epistemic motivation drives the degree to which new information is sought and attended to, encoded, and retrieved. Social motivation and epistemic motivation are expected to influence, alone and in combination, generating problem solutions, disseminating information, and negotiating joint decisions. The MIP-G model integrates the influence of many individual and situational differences and combines insight on human thinking with group-level interaction process and decision making.