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New Causes of Death Consensus Task: A Teaching Activity for Individual and Team Decision-Making
Carrie S. McCleese
College of Business, Tennessee State University, USA
Volume 18: 2025, pp. 249-256; ABSTRACT
The purpose of the present research was to design an activity for classroom use when
teaching organizational behavior concepts related to individual and team decision making. We
modified Taylor’s (1988) classic causes of death consensus task involving ratings of the frequency
of specific causes of death. Using updated data on causes of death in the United States in 2022 from
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, 2024a), we designed an activity for students
asking them to rank order the most common causes of death both individually and in teams in order
to compare individual and group error relative to the CDC data. We provide instructions for
educators and facilitators to administer the activity and suggestions for guiding classroom
discussion. We believe this is a useful and engaging activity for demonstrating organizational
behavior concepts in college or university undergraduate and graduate settings, which we discuss,
along with areas for future research.
Keywords: causes of death, rater error, perceptual errors, individual decision-making, team
decision-making, consensus.
