Post Tagged with: "aggregation"

Aggregation mechanisms, Collaboration Culture, Decision Making/Problem Solving, Group Performance

Wiser, Groupthink and the Common Knowledge Effect

Wiser menI have finished reading “Wiser”, the latest book by the North American jurist and academic Cass Sunstein, co-authored by the Chicago University professor Reid Hastie. It was published in January 2015, so the print is still quite fresh. The book is mainly of interest because it covers factors that give rise to (and can inhibit) Groupthink.

As you may remember, “Groupthink” is a term coined in the seventies by the psychologist Irving Janis, naming those situations where individuals participating in a group adapt and submit to the collective opinion even if it differs from their own point of view. The more cohesive the group the stronger the bias, because the social (and informational) pressure that generate cohesion affect the individuals’ capacity to make good use of their private information sources, thus gravitating to the groups’ central opinion. The consequences of this behavior are negative. Groups end up making bad or irrational decisions because the diversity of opinions of the individual group members are not aggregated efficiently.

Wiser” addresses this issue in two parts. The first half of the book analyses the factors that lead to different cognitive biases when groups are at work as a collective. The second presents different palliative measures for the Groupthink effect.

This subject has been approached by many authors. James Surowiecki, in “The Wisdom of Crowds” analyses this phenomenon in some depth (with plenty of examples), reminding us once more that “as a group becomes more cohesive, the individual becomes more dependent“. Reducing the adverse effect of Groupthink is one the greatest challenges in the practice of Collective Intelligence. Read more ›

by × May 20, 2015 × 1 comment

Aggregation mechanisms, Emergence/Self-organization, Group Performance

Collective Intelligence as a process of aggregation

Collective artThe most referenced concept of “Collective Intelligence” is the one of the MIT Center of Collective Intelligence (CCI): “Groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent”. I already said that it seems to me a weak definition because it is too vague and because it has a limited operative value.

I understand the reasons of the CCI to define a conceptual framework as flexible as possible, especially considering that it is indeed an emerging area of ​​study and it is intended to highlight the inter-disciplinary nature of this field. But even so, I think that trying to fit all the possible definitions in a politically correct one leads to a decaffeinated definition, whose main weakness is that it is not useful to discern.

A good concept is not one that tries to adapt to all existing perspectives, but the one that helps to understand the limits of the identity of something, that is to say, what do we leave inside and outside of the subject we try to define. In fact, often the most effective way to test the reliability of a concept is to see how much it helps to leave things out, that is, it serves to discern. Read more ›

by × June 30, 2014 × 10 comments