Editing Group polarization (section)

== History and origins==
The study of group polarization can be traced back to an unpublished 1961 Master's thesis by MIT student James Stoner, who observed the so-called "risky shift".<ref name="Stoner_a comparison">{{cite journal|last=Stoner|first=J.A.|title=A comparison of individual and group decision involving risk|journal=Unpublished Master's Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology|year=1961}}</ref> The concept of risky shift maintains that a group's decisions are riskier than the average of the individual decisions of members before the group met.

In early studies, the risky-shift phenomenon was measured using a scale known as the Choice-Dilemmas Questionnaire. This measure required participants to consider a hypothetical scenario in which an individual is faced with a dilemma and must make a choice to resolve the issue at hand. Participants were then asked to estimate the probability that a certain choice would be of benefit or risk to the individual being discussed. Consider the following example:<blockquote>"Mr. A, an electrical engineer, who is married and has one child, has been working for a large electronics corporation since graduating from college five years ago. He is assured of a lifetime job with a modest, though adequate, salary and liberal pension benefits upon retirement. On the other hand, it is very unlikely that his salary will increase much before he retires. While attending a convention, Mr. A is offered a job with a small, newly founded company which has a highly uncertain future. The new job would pay more to start and would offer the possibility of a share in the owner- ship if the company survived the competition of the larger firms."</blockquote>Participants were then asked to imagine that they were advising Mr. A. They would then be provided with a series of probabilities that indicate whether the new company that offered him a position is financially stable. It would read as following

"Please check the lowest probability that you would consider acceptable to make it worthwhile for Mr. A to take the new job."

____The chances are 1 in 10 that the company will prove financially sound.

____The chances are 3 in 10 that the company will prove financially sound.

____The chances are 5 in 10 that the company will prove financially sound.

____The chances are 7 in 10 that the company will prove financially sound.

____The chances are 9 in 10 that the company will prove financially sound.

____Place a check here if you think  Mr. A should not take the new job no matter what the probabilities.

Individuals completed the questionnaire and made their decisions independently of others. Later, they would be asked to join a group to reassess their choices. Indicated by shifts in the mean value, initial studies using this method revealed that group decisions tended to be relatively riskier than those that were made by individuals. This tendency also occurred when individual judgments were collected after the group discussion and even when the individual post-discussion measures were delayed two to six weeks.<ref>Forsyth, D.R. (2010) Group Dynamics</ref>

The discovery of the risky shift was considered surprising and counter-intuitive, especially since earlier work in the 1920s and 1930s by Allport and other researchers suggested that individuals made more extreme decisions than did groups, leading to the expectation that groups would make decisions that would conform to the average risk level of its members.<ref name="Stoner_risky and cautious">{{cite journal|last=Stoner|first=James A. F.|title=Risky and cautious shifts in group decisions: the influence of widely held values|journal=Journal of Experimental Social Psychology|year=1968|pages=442–459|doi=10.1016/0022-1031(68)90069-3|volume=4|issue=4|url=http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/48923/1/riskycautiousshi00ston.pdf|hdl=1721.1/48923|hdl-access=free}}</ref> The seemingly counter-intuitive findings of Stoner led to a spurt of research around the risky shift, which was originally thought to be a special case exception to the standard decision-making practice.  Many people had concluded that people in a group setting would make decisions based on what they assumed to be the overall risk level of a group; because Stoner's work did not necessarily address this specific theme, and because it does seem to contrast Stoner's initial definition of risky shift, additional controversy arose leading researchers to further examine the topic. By the late 1960s, however, it had become clear that the risky shift was just one type of many attitudes that became more extreme in groups, leading Moscovici and Zavalloni to term the overall phenomenon "group polarization."<ref>{{cite journal|last=Moscovici|first=S.|author2=M. Zavalloni|title=The group as a polarizer of attitudes|journal=Journal of Personality and Social Psychology|year=1969|volume=12|pages=125–135|doi=10.1037/h0027568|issue=2}}</ref>

Subsequently, a decade-long period of examination of the applicability of group polarization to a number of fields in both lab and field settings began. There is a substantial amount of empirical evidence demonstrating the phenomenon of group polarization. Group polarization has been widely considered as a fundamental group decision-making process and was well established, but remained non-obvious and puzzling because its mechanisms were not fully understood.