Tacit Coordination in Anticipation of Small Group Task Completion

Group members may tacitly coordinate their actions by predicting others' behaviors and adjusting their own behavior accordingly to meet the perceived demands of their collective task. Subjects read and recalled political candidate statements while anticipating either a group decision-making or collective recall task. When anticipating collective recall, they remembered more statements about topics outside of other members' expected expertise, whereas they recalled more statements associated with others' expected expertise when anticipating group choice. In a follow-up study, the bias toward duplicating others' expected expertise under a choice set occurred when participants anticipated discussion followed by private choice but not when they anticipated having to satisfy an explicitly assigned group decision rule. These results are discussed in terms of a model of anticipatory tacit coordination.