Avoiding the Pitfalls of the Dunning-Kruger Effect and Groupthink (original) (raw)

Many philosophers share the strong intuition that mental or cognitive properties should be attributed at exactly one level of organization: the individual organism. In particular, individual human beings are considered to be the paradigmatic subjects of mental properties. However, many highly prized activities in our species are accomplished only when we think and act together in groups. Can a group constitute a cognitive system—a mind—in its own right? The so-called “group mind” thesis was a popular fixture in the intellectual landscape of the late 19th and early 20th century (Wilson, 2004). It crystallized the idea of a group as a collective agent, and its gestalt as an emergent whole that is more than the sum of its parts. To its own detriment, many traditional formulations of this idea remained highly speculative and often bordered on the occult. As a result, the “group mind” concept quickly fell out of favor with the rise of behaviorism in psychology, since it remained unclear where the “group mind” was supposed to reside, and how we could measure it (Wegner, 1986). One way to summarize the precarious ontological status of group minds is in the form of the following dilemma. If the group mind is nothing over and above the collection of individual minds and their interactions, an appeal to group minds appears to be redundant. However, if the group mind is something over and above all these things, it appears to imply a collective version of mind-body dualism. This raises the familiar question of how the group mind exercises its causal influence on group members. Some bizarre answers were suggested in response to this problem, such as the putative mediation of a genetic “ectoplasm” (Jung, 1922) or telepathic communication (McDougall, 1920). In sum, neither horn of the dilemma makes the idea of group minds seem very attractive. However, roughly fifty years after the “cognitive revolution” in psychology, the idea that groups can have cognitive properties of their own has gained new ascendancy in a wide range of disciplines concerned with group behavior. Rather than engaging in abstract arguments about the possibility of “group minds,” contemporary appeals to group cognition have typically tied their claims to particular kinds of psychological predicates. For instance, social psychologists studying memory, problem-solving, and decision-making in small groups have based their work on a view of groups as adaptive information-processing systems in their own right (Wegner et al., 1985; Cicourel, 1990; Larsen & Christensen, 1993; Hinsz et al., 1997; Propp, 1999; Stasser, 1999; Mohammed & Dumville, 2001; Lewis, 2003; Goldstone & Gureckis, 2009). Organizational scientists have studied the memory and learning processes of firms and organizations (Sandelands & Stablein, 1987; Walsh & Ungson, 1991; Argote, 1999). Sociologists, anthropologists, and historians have found it useful to express generalizations about social groups in terms of their collective memory (Burke, 1989; Le Goff, 1992). Economists and political scientists continue to explore the relationships between individual and group rationality in the arena of judgment aggregation (Pettit, 2003; List, 2003, 2010). Evolutionary biologists have revived the idea that groups can evolve into adaptive units of cognition as a result of group-selection (D.S. Wilson, 1997, 2002; D.S. Wilson, van Vugt, & O’Gorman, 2008). Recent studies of animal behavior have revealed a number of collective decision-making mechanisms that are shared across a wide range of group types such as swarming ants, schooling fish, flocking birds, and also humans (Hölldobler & E.O. Wilson, 1990; Seeley, 1995; Bonabeau, Dorigo, & Theraulaz, 1999; Couzin, 2009). The framework of distributed cognition has been used to study the dynamics of collaborative work practices which are socially, technologically, and temporally distributed, and whose coordination is mediated by rich situational, material, and organizational constraints. (Hutchins, 1995a, 1995b; Hollan, Hutchins, & Kirsh, 2000). The framework of distributed cognition has recently been embraced by some philosophers of science as a unifying framework to overcome the present hiatus between “rationalist” and “social-constructionist” approaches to scientific cognition (Giere, 2002, 2005; Giere & Moffat, 2003; Nersessian, 2006). The term “crowdsourcing” has been coined to describe ways of leveraging Web 2.0 technologies for the purposes of mass collaboration (Howe, 2006; Shirky, 2008). Finally, philosophers seeking a conceptual analysis of collective intentionality—such as collective beliefs, intentions, and responsibilities—have tied their accounts to the recognition of groups as intentional subjects in their own right (Gilbert, 1989; Velleman, 1997; Schmitt, 2003; Tollefsen, 2004; List, 2010).