Some animals, like flocks of birds, schools of fish, or colonies of ants or bees, have a form of collective intelligence that allows them to move and work together as a group.
Do humans also have some primitive connection to the other people around them that cuases them to "become one" with the group? Do we have different roles (like soldier ants vs gatherers or sentries) that are inborn traits?
2006-07-13 07:20:01 · 5 answers · asked by ivehadit 4 in Social Science ➔ Psychology
There is a fringe field of social science that adopts some elements of phyisics and bioscience that is refered to as complexity theory. Your observation about fish and birds is thought to be the outcomes of groups of individual particles behaving by "simple rules" to react adaptively to their environment. Companies like Dreamworks and Pixar use this to create things like birds. I guy named Reynolds invented "boids" that was an animated flock of birds.
The collective intelligence aspect of this is interesting. The idea that no single individual would "know" what the group as a whole knows is a phenomenon looked at in the social psychology literature stream of "collective intellegence". A key writer for this is a guy named Walsh, who is renown for taking apart accidents like the space shuttle, or aircraft carrier incidents and showing how no-one could have known enough to prevent the accident themselves, but the failure originated from a breakdown in the coupling of the individuals in the team of group.
We do have some in-born traits that lead us to this cooperative behavior, the most well studied is our bias towards trusting strangers (which when we are screwed, we adjust accordingly). This trust allows us to create an environment where we can allow what is called "transactive memory" to emerge. Husbands and wives for example tend diverge in their attention to everyday items for example. This is pure Adam Smith sort of benefit where the specialization allows for more productive use of each team members' efforts.
FYI, this specialization and group behavior is found least amongst Americans (this is not criticism, just a difference) who tend to have well defined boundaries toward what they define as "self"
Chinese for example, do not resist influence of in-group others' goals or interests as much, so that you may find that they tend to behave as you mentioned above, but in a family or familial structured group.
Interesting topic, just so happens I'm doing research on it and its organizational implications across countries/cultures.
2006-07-13 10:37:12 · answer #1 · answered by bizsmithy 5 · 4⤊ 0⤋
An interesting question for the current medium. The Yahoo! Answers forum operates under the assumption that such a principle is true.
2006-07-13 07:25:06 · answer #2 · answered by sleepysteve 1 · 1⤊ 0⤋
The Borg........Mob mentality......Mass hysteria, I'm sorry I didn't mean to trivialize an intelligent question, I just am tired of having to think today as it seems nobody else is. I hope you get lots of intuitive answers.
2006-07-13 07:27:26 · answer #3 · answered by Yakuza 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Yes the Caucasians do! The become posse when together! Individually they can be the sweetest! As a group; very dangerous! Check your history! "came to kill steal and destroy!"
2006-07-13 07:27:23 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 1⤋
We are all connected. We are also really good at pretending we are not.
2006-07-13 08:23:35 · answer #5 · answered by rodneycrater 3 · 2⤊ 0⤋