Social: Social Cognition and Teamwork - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 228

18. User was going through a life-changing event, such as moving, pneumonia,
their own death, having a baby, losing a baby, loss of a relative, or several of
these at the same time.
19. User wrote email and, instead of sending it, filed it as if it was the email being
replied to. (Ritter, September 2006; to Ritter, 2009).
20. Print out of email was printed and deleted, and was then stapled to the back of
another document printed before it. (Ritter, multiple times).
21. Auto expansion from first name (e.g., Jacob) instead of from last name (e.g.,
Jacob).
22. Email sent from local conference hotel run by major research university never
arrived or bounced.
23. Emails included as attachments in the middle of the body of a message (rather
than in the header or at the end of the body).
24. Email software and anything in between (e.g., router, ISP, recipient) changes
security level. (Ritter, Feb. 2009, and earlier).
25. Students told/reminded to read their student email account (with clunky
interface) by an email sent to that address.
26. User replied to questions by answering them on the same line, not a separate
line as the quoted questions. The reader only saw their original questions.
27. Migration to MS Outlook server did not migrate all emails.
8.2.4 Majority and Minority Effects
The way that individuals behave when they are part of a group usually differs
from how they would behave on their own. There is a strong tendency to be
influenced by what the group says or does. If the majority of members of a group
express a single opinion, it is much less likely that one individual will hold onto a
different opinion, even if they know that they are correct. This effect derives from
the desire in a group to maintain harmony or conformity, and minimizes conflict.
This can result in incorrect or deviant decision making. This has been raised as a
concern for juries, for example, where what is called group think can occur
(McCauley 1989 ).
These issues have been studied with experiments using a group where some of
the group members were confederates of the experimenter, that is, people who
were not really subjects in the study. With a stooge majority (i.e., in a room full of
experimenters pretending to be other subjects in the study), individuals readily
capitulated to the majority view, even when they were fully aware of the right
answer. With a stooge minority, where the group in the experiment had a minority
of confederates who held an incorrect opinion, many individuals do capitulate
occasionally to their view.
Another way in which this can play out is with what is called choice shift. Two
good examples of this are the risky shift, where a group makes a riskier decision
than an individual. Wallach et al. ( 1964 ) proposed that greater risk-taking results