The Article on drug harms in the UK1 reports a study in which a group of 15 people (members of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, including two invited specialists) rated drugs on 16 criteria. The Article reports that the group had a "facilitator", and that "The group scored each drug on each harm criterion in an open discussion". In other words, the group, and not independent judges (blind to the opinions of others in the group) made the ratings. This is unfortunate practice, because it exposes the outcomes (the ratings of the drugs) to the vagaries, as well as any benefits, of group processes. Of obvious relevance is the phenomenon of "group polarisation", long studied by social psychologists, in which discussion tends to make individual ratings become more extreme, in the same direction, as the initial group mean.
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