Groupthinking
The Independence Thesis: When Individual and Social Epistemology Diverge
Conor Mayo-Wilson, Kevin Zollman & David Danks
Philosophy of Science, October 2011, Pages 653-677
Abstract:
Several philosophers of science have argued that epistemically rational individuals might form epistemically irrational groups and that, conversely, rational groups might be composed of irrational individuals. We call the conjunction of these two claims the Independence Thesis, as they entail that methodological prescriptions for scientific communities and those for individual scientists are logically independent. We defend the inconsistency thesis by characterizing four criteria for epistemic rationality and then proving that, under said criteria, individuals will be judged rational when groups are not and vice versa. We then explain the implications of our results for descriptive history of science and normative epistemology.
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On keeping your enemies close: Powerful leaders seek proximity to ingroup power threats
Nicole Mead & Jon Maner
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Throughout history, humans have had to detect and deflect myriad threats from their social and physical environment in order to survive and flourish. When people detect a threat, the most common response is avoidance. In the present research, the authors provide evidence that ingroup power threats elicit a very different response. Three experiments supported the hypothesis that dominant leaders seek proximity to ingroup members who pose a threat to their power, as a way to control and downregulate the threat that those members pose. In each experiment, leaders high (but not low) in dominance motivation sought proximity to an ingroup member who threatened their power. Consistent with the hypothesis that increased proximity was designed to help leaders protect their own power, the proximity effect was apparent only under conditions of unstable power (not stable power), only in the absence of intergroup competition (not when a rival outgroup was present), and only toward a threatening group member (not a neutral group member). Moreover, the effect was mediated by perceptions of threat (Experiment 1) and the desire to monitor the threatening group member (Experiment 3). These results shed new light on one key strategy through which dominant leaders try to maintain control over valuable yet potentially threatening group members. Findings have implications for theories of power, leadership, and group behavior.
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Why individuals in larger teams perform worse
Jennifer Mueller
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research shows that individuals in larger teams perform worse than individuals in smaller teams; however, very little field research examines why. The current study of 212 knowledge workers within 26 teams, ranging from 3 to 19 members in size, employs multi-level modeling to examine the underlying mechanisms. The current investigation expands upon Steiner's (1972) model of individual performance in group contexts identifying one missing element of process loss, namely relational loss. Drawing from the literature on stress and coping, relational loss, a unique form of individual level process, loss occurs when an employee perceives that support is less available in the team as team size increases. In the current study, relational loss mediated the negative relationship between team size and individual performance even when controlling for extrinsic motivation and perceived coordination losses. This suggests that larger teams diminish perceptions of available support which would otherwise buffer stressful experiences and promote performance.
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Unravelling Bueno De Mesquita's group decision model
Jason Scholz, Gregory Calbert & Glen Smith
Journal of Theoretical Politics, October 2011, Pages 510-531
Abstract:
Political scientist Professor Bruce Bueno De Mesquita, has made significant claims for the predictive accuracy of his computational model of group decision making, receiving much popular press, including newspaper articles, books and a television documentary entitled ‘The New Nostradamus'. Despite these and many journal and conference publications related to the topic, no clear elucidation of the model exists in the open literature or can be found in a single place. We expose and present the model by careful navigation of the literature and illustrate the soundness of our interpretation by replicating De Mesquita's own results. We also raise issues regarding sensitivity and convergence.
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Elizabeth Boyle & Zur Shapira
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We extend the variable risk preferences model of decision making to a competitive context in order to develop theory about how competition affects both focus of attention and risk taking. We hypothesize and find support for leader-follower differences in the channeling of attention to an aspiration or survival point. Our results indicate that leaders focus on their aspiration point, whereas followers' focus of attention shifts between their aspiration and survival points. By identifying and elaborating on the different cognitive loads and social expectations related to the positions of leader and follower, we show that leaders are prone to take excessive risks to maintain their leadership position. We refer to this phenomenon as the liability of leading. Our study context is a naturally occurring experiment in strategic decision making, the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions.
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The pursuit of missing information in negotiation
Maia Young et al.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
A large body of research has focused on how people exchange and use information during the negotiation process. This work tends to treat information as if it all were readily available upon request. The current research investigated how delays in the pursuit of missing information can influence people's ex-ante priorities and the final settlements they reach. Study 1 found that negotiators achieved more value on an issue after seeking missing information about that issue compared to when the same information was readily accessible. Study 2 found that the effect of searching for information on outcomes was mediated by changes in how important negotiators perceived the issue to be. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
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The powerful disregard social comparison information
Camille Johnson & Joris Lammers
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social comparisons are important because other people can serve as benchmarks to determine one's own capabilities and act as sources for inspiration. Despite this, people do not always fully utilize social comparison information. The present paper demonstrates that feelings of power may reduce use of social comparison information. In three experiments, participants were first induced to feel high or low in power, or were in a control condition. Then, they were exposed to either upward or downward comparison targets. In all three experiments, low power participants responded to targets with contrast or assimilation, whereas high power participants did not. This has important implications for our understanding of how people's positions in the social and organizational hierarchies affect their basic psychological functioning.
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Team size and quality of group experience: The more the merrier?
Caroline Aubé, Vincent Rousseau & Sébastien Tremblay
Group Dynamics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this study we investigated the relationship between team size and quality of group experience as well as the mediating role of counterproductive behaviors. The study was conducted among a sample of 97 work teams from a public safety organization. The results support the negative relationship between team size and quality of group experience. In addition, each of the 4 categories of counterproductive behaviors (i.e., parasitism, interpersonal aggression, boastfulness, and misuse of resources) plays a mediating role in this relationship. This study shows the importance for managers to avoid creating overly large teams, at the risk of fostering the adoption of counterproductive behaviors and adversely affecting the quality of life at work within teams.
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Dynamical strength of social ties in information spreading
Giovanna Miritello, Esteban Moro & Rubén Lara
Physical Review E, April 2011
Abstract:
We investigate the temporal patterns of human communication and its influence on the spreading of information in social networks. The analysis of mobile phone calls of 20 million people in one country shows that human communication is bursty and happens in group conversations. These features have the opposite effects on the reach of the information: while bursts hinder propagation at large scales, conversations favor local rapid cascades. To explain these phenomena we define the dynamical strength of social ties, a quantity that encompasses both the topological and the temporal patterns of human communication.
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Individualism-collectivism and team member performance: Another look
John Wagner et al.
Journal of Organizational Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study revisits the commonplace research conclusion that greater team member collectivism, as opposed to individualism, is associated with higher levels of individual-level performance in teams. Whereas this conclusion is based on the assumption that work in teams consists exclusively of tasks that are shared, typical teamwork also includes tasks that are individualized. Results of a laboratory study of 206 participants performing a mix of individualized and shared tasks in four-person teams indicate that heterogeneous combinations of individualism and collectivism are associated with higher levels of team member performance, measured as quantity of output, when loose structural interdependence enables individual differences in individualism-collectivism to exert meaningful effects. These results support the modified conclusion that a combination of individualism and collectivism is associated with higher levels of member performance in teams under typical work conditions; that is, conditions in which the tasks of individual members are both individualized and shared.
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Bahador Bahrami et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, forthcoming
Abstract:
That objective reference is necessary for formation of reliable beliefs about the external world is almost axiomatic. However, Condorcet (1785) suggested that purely subjective information - if shared and combined via social interaction - is enough for accurate understanding of the external world. We asked if social interaction and objective reference contribute differently to the formation and build-up of collective perceptual beliefs. In three experiments, dyads made individual and collective perceptual decisions in a two-interval, forced-choice, visual search task. In Experiment 1, participants negotiated their collective decisions with each other verbally and received feedback about accuracy at the end of each trial. In Experiment 2, feedback was not given. In Experiment 3, communication was not allowed but feedback was provided. Social interaction (Experiments 1 and 2 vs. 3) resulted in a significant collective benefit in perceptual decisions. When feedback was not available a collective benefit was not initially obtained but emerged through practice to the extent that in the second half of the experiments, collective benefits obtained with (Experiment 1) and without (Experiment 2) feedback were robust and statistically indistinguishable. Taken together, this work demonstrates that social interaction was necessary for build-up of reliable collaborative benefit, whereas objective reference only accelerated the process but - given enough opportunity for practice - was not necessary for building up successful cooperation.
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Maciej Chudek et al.
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Reasoning about the evolution of our species' capacity for cumulative cultural learning has led culture-gene coevolutionary (CGC) theorists to predict that humans should possess several learning biases which robustly enhance the fitness of cultural learners. Meanwhile, developmental psychologists have begun using experimental procedures to probe the learning biases that young children actually possess - a methodology ripe for testing CGC. Here we report the first direct tests in children of CGC's prediction of prestige bias, a tendency to learn from individuals to whom others have preferentially attended, learned or deferred. Our first study showed that the odds of 3- and 4-year-old children learning from an adult model to whom bystanders had previously preferentially attended for 10 seconds (the prestigious model) were over twice those of their learning from a model whom bystanders ignored. Moreover, this effect appears domain-sensitive: in Study 2 when bystanders preferentially observed a prestigious model using artifacts, she was learned from more often on subsequent artifact-use tasks (odds almost five times greater) but not on food-preference tasks, while the reverse was true of a model who received preferential bystander attention while expressing food preferences.
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Oscar Ybarra et al.
European Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social acceptance and the development of one's competencies and status are fundamental aspects of the human experience, but the former (communion) should take precedence over the latter (agency) in self-judgment. Study 1 results indicated that (i) people across two cultures judged themselves as possessing higher communion than agency characteristics; (ii) communion self-judgments were more consistent across temporal perspective; and (iii) level of self-enhancement across cultures was similar for communion but different for agency. In Study 2, people across culture reported being more troubled and demonstrated a greater desire to repair their reputation when they imagined others perceived them as lacking in communion compared with agency. These findings support the idea that social life pressures people to view themselves as possessing communion traits and to ensure that others have this perception as well.
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Jan Zwickel et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, October 2011, Pages 564-571
Abstract:
Individuals with autism spectrum disorders have highly characteristic impairments in social interaction and this is true also for those with high functioning autism or Asperger syndrome (AS). These social cognitive impairments are far from global and it seems likely that some of the building blocks of social cognition are intact. In our first experiment, we investigated whether high functioning adults who also had a diagnosis of AS would be similar to control participants in terms of their eye movements when watching animated triangles in short movies that normally evoke mentalizing. They were. Our second experiment using the same movies, tested whether both groups would spontaneously adopt the visuo-spatial perspective of a triangle protagonist. They did. At the same time autistic participants differed in their verbal accounts of the story line underlying the movies, confirming their specific difficulties in on-line mentalizing. In spite of this difficulty, two basic building blocks of social cognition appear to be intact: spontaneous agency perception and spontaneous visual perspective taking.
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No person is an island: The effects of group characteristics on individual trait expression
Joseph Schmidt, Babatunde Ogunfowora & Joshua Bourdage
Journal of Organizational Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although most researchers now espouse a person-by-situation interactionist approach, there remains much work to be carried out to fully understand how different features of the environment interact with personality to influence behavior. Thus, this study sought to examine the moderating effects of three group-level constructs on the relationships between two personality traits (conscientiousness and extraversion) and individual performance and counterproductive behaviors. Specifically, using trait activation theory as an organizing framework, we considered the moderating effects of the following: (i) a previously unexamined construct called core group evaluations (CGEs); (ii) group conscientiousness composition; and (iii) group extraversion composition. Data were obtained from a sample of university football players (N = 225-252 from 40 groups). The results indicated that CGEs moderated the relationships between individual conscientiousness and both performance (subjective) and counterproductive behaviors. Group conscientiousness composition also moderated the relationships between individual conscientiousness and both performance (objective and subjective) and counterproductive behaviors. Lastly, group extraversion composition moderated the relationship between individual extraversion and counterproductive behaviors. These findings highlight the importance of considering a team's CGEs, as well as the personality composition of team members when investigating the effects of conscientiousness and extraversion on individual performance and counterproductive behaviors.
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Conversion vs. Tolerance: Minority-focused influence strategies can affect group loyalty
Emily Shaffer & Radmila Prislin
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, September 2011, Pages 755-766
Abstract:
Past research has documented that social change has different implications for group identification when it is effected through successful minority's advocacy for tolerance of diversity vs. conversion of opponents to supporters. Extending these findings, the current study demonstrated that minorities who successfully advocated tolerance, compared to those who successfully converted opponents, were more loyal to the group. This was evident in their working harder for the group at their own personal expense and without expecting anything in return. The effect of influence strategy on group loyalty was mediated by evaluative and cognitive components of group identification. Implications for group dynamics in which active minorities employ different influence strategies and their motivational underpinnings are discussed.
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Predicting Decisions in Human Social Interactions Using Real-Time fMRI and Pattern Classification
Maurice Hollmann et al.
PLoS ONE, October 2011, e25304
Abstract:
Negotiation and trade typically require a mutual interaction while simultaneously resting in uncertainty which decision the partner ultimately will make at the end of the process. Assessing already during the negotiation in which direction one's counterpart tends would provide a tremendous advantage. Recently, neuroimaging techniques combined with multivariate pattern classification of the acquired data have made it possible to discriminate subjective states of mind on the basis of their neuronal activation signature. However, to enable an online-assessment of the participant's mind state both approaches need to be extended to a real-time technique. By combining real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and online pattern classification techniques, we show that it is possible to predict human behavior during social interaction before the interacting partner communicates a specific decision. Average accuracy reached approximately 70% when we predicted online the decisions of volunteers playing the ultimatum game, a well-known paradigm in economic game theory. Our results demonstrate the successful online analysis of complex emotional and cognitive states using real-time fMRI, which will enable a major breakthrough for social fMRI by providing information about mental states of partners already during the mutual interaction. Interestingly, an additional whole brain classification across subjects confirmed the online results: anterior insula, ventral striatum, and lateral orbitofrontal cortex, known to act in emotional self-regulation and reward processing for adjustment of behavior, appeared to be strong determinants of later overt behavior in the ultimatum game. Using whole brain classification we were also able to discriminate between brain processes related to subjective emotional and motivational states and brain processes related to the evaluation of objective financial incentives.