CENTRALITY IN SOCIOCOGNITIVE NETWORKS AND SOCIAL-INFLUENCE - AN ILLUSTRATION IN A GROUP DECISION-MAKING CONTEXT

Social influence in consensus formation was examined using a notion of sociocognitive network. Given the robustness of shared information in determining group decisions, the authors propose the concept of a soc iocognitive network that captures the degree of members' knowledge-sha ring prior to group interaction. A link connecting a given pair of mem bers represents the amount of information that the pair shares before interaction. As in a regular social network, a member's status can be defined by the centrality in the network; the more information a membe r shares with others, the more cognitively central the member is in th e group. The authors hypothesized that a cognitively central member wo uld acquire pivotal power in a group and exert more influence on conse nsus than would peripheral members, independently of the member's pref erence majority or minority status The results of two studies supporte d these predictions.