Emergent Processes in Group Behavior

Abstract

ABSTRACT-Just as neurons interconnect in networks that create structured thoughts beyond the ken of any individual neuron, so people spontaneously organize themselves into groups to create emergent organizations that no individual may intend, comprehend, or even perceive. Recent technological advances have provided us with unprecedented opportunities for conducting controlled laboratory experiments on human collective behavior. We describe two experimental paradigms in which we attempt to build predictive bridges between the beliefs, goals, and cognitive capacities of individuals and patterns of behavior at the group level, showing how the members of a group dynamically allocate themselves to resources and how innovations diffuse through a social network. Agent-based computational models have provided useful explanatory and predictive accounts. Together, the models and experiments point to tradeoffs between exploration and exploitation-that is, compromises between individuals using their own innovations and using innovations obtained from their peers-and the emergence of group-level organizations such as population waves, bandwagon effects, and spontaneous specialization.KEYWORDS-collective behavior; imitation; social networks; competition; group behavior; foraging It is natural for psychologists to focus on the behavior of single individuals, because introspection provides people with motivation and perspective at this level. However, in a literal sense, we are all participating in entities greater than ourselves. Selforganized collectives of people create emergent group-level patterns that are rarely understood or intended by any individual. A business has a style and ethos that transcends its employees. A culture has a nature, integrity, and systematicity that transcends its inhabitants while still being grounded by their interactions (Atran, Medin, & Ross, 2005). Social phenomena such as the spread of gossip, the World-Wide Web, the popularity of cultural icons, legal systems, and scientific establishments all take on a life of their own, complete with their own self-organized divisions of labor and specialization, dynamics, feedback loops, growth, and adaptations.A considerable amount of early work on group behavior from social psychology focused on interpersonal relations and the attributes that characterize good leaders or work teams. However, the social patterns that people form are often organized without explicit leaders, chains of command, or fixed communication networks (Ball, 2004). Examples of such spontaneously emerging social patterns include book recommendations on Amazon.com (which evolve based upon similar readers' buying habits), fans at a sport stadium, grassroots political movements, the development of a fully cross-indexed and intricately organized online encyclopedia that any person can edit (www. wikipedia.org), and an online venue for media sharing that is freely accessible to both providers and consumers yet still shows striking trends of rich-get-richer popularity (www.youtube.com). I...

A dynamical connectionist model of idea generation

“…This does not always lead to increased productivity, but has a distinctive phenomenology [20]- [24]. We model a group as a social network of agents [38], [56], each with its own ideation process, represented by a dynamical neural network with units representing ideas clustered into multiple domains -corresponding roughly to the ESDs of the individual model. The system's dynamics tends to remain within its current domain unless switched out of it by noise, interference, or by an external cue (e.g., an idea from another agent).…”

“…It also draws upon ideas from dynamical models of cognitive function [33]- [37]. Group ideation is modeled by a system of interacting agents [38] generating ideas through the interaction of their internal cognitive dynamics and ideas received from other agents.…”

Is Distributed Cognition Group Level Cognition?

“…In a 2010 paper in Cognitive Systems Research, "Recognizing Group Cognition, " Theiner et al (2010, p. 378) claim that "recent studies of group problem solving and group memory … reveal that specific cognitive capacities that are commonly ascribed to individuals are also aptly ascribed at the level of groups." The thesis has a long history, and has been gaining renewed momentum in recent years with support from a variety of considerations (French 1979;Wegner 1986;Hutchins 1995;List 2003;Heylighen et al 2004;Tollefsen 2006;Gureckis and Goldstone 2006;Goldstone et al 2008;Theiner 2009Theiner , 2013aSutton et al 2010;Theiner and O'Connor 2010;List and Pettit 2011;Gallagher 2013;Michaelian and Sutton 2013;Szanto 2014).…”

Modelling Global Pattern Formations for Collaborative Learning Environments

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