Groupthinkisnomatchforindividualgenius.doc

Groupthink is no match for individual geniusBy Christopher Caldwell 字号 最大 较大 默认 较小 最小 背景 中文 评论 打印 电邮 收藏 If you lock a bunch of high-IQ people in a room and tell them to get on with a simple task, what will they emerge with? Lower IQs, for one thing. A study done by Virginia Tech and a few other institutions, written up over the winter in a publication of the Royal Society, tried to replicate how people think under social pressure. Subjects with an average IQ of 126 were clustered into problem-solving groups and exposed to judgments about their work. A pecking order formed. The low performers showed high responses in the part of the brain that regulates fear. Most of the men became “high performers”, most of the women “low performers”, but no one blossomed. The scientists concluded that “individuals express diminished cognitive capacity in small groups, an effect that is exacerbated by perceived lower status”. In other words, they get dumber.This confirms common sense. Maybe you can communicate with a slower person by turning off brainpower you have, but you cant communicate with a cleverer person by creating brainpower you dont have. Yet this is the first ill word any scientist has had for the way groups think in a very long time. Group intelligence is in vogue. Over the past decade or two, story after story has spoken glowingly of “bandwagon effects” and the “hive mind”, of “memes” and the “wisdom of crowds”. Are these profound new insights or are they a cognitive-science trend on which the tide is now receding?They are both. There is certainly something measurable that can be called collective intelligence. A fascinating study of its operation was carried out by scientists at Carnegie-Mellon university, MIT and other universities and published in the magazine Science two years ago. The authors started by describing the concept of “g”, or “general intelligence”. The English psychologist Charles Spearman discovered g in 1904, showing that practically all mental tasks are positively correlated. If youre good at maths, youre more likely to be a good poet. And since there is an intellectual component to a lot of things we dont think of as “brainwork”, if youre a good poet youre more likely to be a good soldier or a good athlete, too.The idea that mental talents should be so unfairly meted out in society was disheartening to peoples sense of fairness in Spearmans age and it is repugnant to egalitarians today. People have spent a century trying to debunk the idea of g, and they have failed. So this unpopular concept has become “arguably, the most replicated result in all of psychology”, as the scientists put it. They therefore had the idea that if they could find a collective equivalent of g group intelligence correlated across all tasks they would probably have found group intelligence. They asked small groups to do a variety of mental tests and then play a computer in a game of draughts.A collective equivalent of g is just what they found. Moreover, it was not just an artefact of the individual intelligences that made up the groups. The correlation of group thinking with the average intelligence of the group, or with the intelligence of the groups smartest member, was weak. Strong correlations were with the “average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversation turn-taking and the proportion of females”. In plainer English: listening helps. Office bullies and alpha-types who cant shut up drive down productivity. And there is a benefit to gender diversity. One article commenting on the study speculated that this might be due to womens readiness to admit when they dont know something.These two findings that there is such a thing as collective intelligence and that working in groups makes individuals a bit duller are not necessarily contradictory. A human being probably loses a bit of thinking capacity in subordinating himself to a group, no matter what feats the collective is able to carry out. Whether this trade-off is worthwhile depends on what the groups are doing. If western culture as it existed until two decades ago stood for any one thing, it was the defence of the individual against the herd. Individuals produced King Lear and the Discourse on the Method. The “wisdom of crowds” produces a few retail fads at best, book-burnings and pogroms at worst.Our own time thinks itself different. It is marked by integration of markets and innovations in networking and sales. Crowd-sourced Wikipedia (flawed, quick and free) helped drive Britannica (authoritative, labour-intensive and dear) out of the paper encyclopedia business. No one has the time to read King Lear, let alone write it. Anybody who can spark a retail fad is acclaimed a genius. The wisdom of crowds, in fact, may be just an updated version of the age-old wisdom of retail: when it comes to what the crowd wants, the crowd is omniscient.The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard集体思维降低个体智商？ 旗帜周刊高级编辑 克里斯托弗考德威尔 为英国金融时报撰稿 字号 最大 较大 默认 较小 最小 背景 英文 对照 评论 打印 电邮 收藏 如果你将一群高智商的人锁在一个房间里，然后交给他们一个简单的任务，那么结果会怎样呢？智商降低是结果之一。弗吉尼亚理工学院(Virginia Tech)和其他几个机构在冬季撰写、最终发表在皇家学会(Royal Society)刊物上的一项研究，试图探索人们在社会压力下如何思考。平均智商为126的研究对象，被分成解决问题的若干组，他们的工作受到评委的评判。于是一种强弱顺序就形成了。表现较差者的大脑中控制担忧情绪的部位反应非常活跃。大多数男性成为表现较优者，大多数女性成为表现较差者，但没有真正表现出色的。于是科学家得出这样的结论：“在小集体里，个体的认知能力有所下降，而如果个体感觉地位下降，这种效应就更明显。”换句话说，他们变蠢了。这证实了一个常识。或许你可以通过降低“智能”与一个比较迟钝的人交流，但你无法创造自己并不具备的“智能”与一个更聪明的人交流。然而，这是很久以来科学家首次对群体思维给出负面评价。现在时兴群体思维。过去的一二十年，各方抛出很多事例，高度赞许“潮流效应”、“思维的集体意识”、以及“群体智慧”。那么这些是崭新的见解，还是一个正在消退的认知科学的趋势？二者都是。确实是有某种叫做“集体智慧”的可衡量的东西。卡内基梅隆大学(Carnegie-Mellon university)、麻省理工学院(MIT)以及其他几所大学的科学家共同开展了有关“集体智慧”如何运行的一项有趣研究，并发表在两年前的科学(Science)杂志上。作者们首先描述“g”概念，即“一般智力”(general intelligence)。英国心理学家查尔斯斯皮尔曼(Charles Spearman)于1904年提出了“g”，表明几乎所有的脑力劳动都是正相关的：如果你擅长于数学，那么你更有可能成为一位优秀的诗人。由于我们不觉得是“脑力劳动”的很多事都有一个智慧成分，因此如果你擅长于诗作，你更有可能成为一个优秀的士兵或者是运动员。在斯皮尔曼那个时代，脑力天赋竟然如此不公平地在社会上得到分配的构想，让人们的公平感受挫，当今的公平主义者对此更加反感。一个世纪以来人们一直在试图揭穿“g”概念，但都以失败告终。因此，正如科学家们所表述的，这一不受欢迎的理念“堪称整个心理学领域被复制最多的结果”。因此，他们产生一个主意：如果他们找得到“g”的集体对应物：与所有任务都有相