Individuals and dyads in a multiple-cue judgment task: Cognitive processes and performance

Virtually all studies of multiple-cue judgment focus on the learning by individuals. In a multiple-cue judgment task the authors examined if people acquire rule or exemplar knowledge as a function of learning the task alone or in dyads. Learning in dyads was expected to promote explicit rule-based thinking as a consequence of verbalization (social abstraction effect) and to improve performance due to the larger joint exemplar knowledge base (exemplar pooling effect). In two experiments the results suggest more accurate judgment by dyads, evidence for an exemplar pooling effect, but no evidence for the social abstraction effect. In contrast to most previous research, social interaction proved beneficial and allowed the dyads to surpass their combined individual performance.