It's a matter of fact: We don't always listen to the most fact-filled person in the room. When in meetings, we often don't opt for the opinion of the expert. Instead, we defer to the loudest person in the room--which will be great for their ego, but awful for our decisions.

Why? New research from the University of Utah and Idaho State University helps us to see why we follow the loudmouth. According to a Wall Street Journal blog:

People tend to rely too much on “messy proxies for expertise”--such as a speaker’s confidence level, extroversion, gender and/or race--and not enough on the content of his or her contributions, when making judgments about expertise, says Mr. Bonner, (the study's lead author). Doing so can be costly if the group doesn’t heed those with the most relevant knowledge, Mr. Bonner says.

We tend to guess at who the expert is, Bonner says, though confidence doesn't necessarily correlate with expertise.

But the gift of gab problem isn't so pronounced in subjective tasks like idea generation, Bonner says. It's more a problem for when there's a clearly correct answer, for example, when you're figuring out the number of products you'll ship next week.

So here's a clear problem. What to do about it?

CLEANING UP THE MEETING MESS

We've spent some time contemplating meeting malfeasance at Fast Company. Here are a few of our solutions:

* Recognize that meetings get off track for many reasons. Find out why.

* Don't brainstorm, "brain-write." Start the meeting with everybody writing downtheir ideas without talking to anyone first--then you'll avoid the constraining effects of groupthink.

* Invest in (creative) solitude. Kellogg management professor and Creative Conspiracy author Leigh Thompson has an idea for productive, well-communicated isolation:

Let the independent start the day in her cave, free of email, drop-in meetings, and other subtle suckers of productivity. Then have everybody assemble around the campfire at a regular hour--like maybe around lunchtime.

Hat tip: the Wall Street Journal