This post is the thirteenth in a series of sixteen that address The Knowledge Illusion and unless otherwise noted all quotes are from The Knowledge Illusion. I recommend reading all sixteen posts in order.
I have written on numerous other books on psychology, social psychology, critical thinking, cognitive dissonance theory and related topics already but discovered this one and feel it plays a complimentary and very needed role. It helps to explain a huge number of "hows" and "whys" regarding the other subjects I mentioned, all of the subjects.
In chapter ten, The New Definition of Smart, the authors take on this concept in light of everything they have discovered. In this chapter they discuss the fact that we achieve things together. From Martin Luther King Jr and the thousands and thousands of activists in the civil rights movement to the large number of people who wrote the twenty thousand pages of the affordable care act, many things that the history books credit to one person involve and require many, many more people to be achieved.
We think of individuals as entire movements and mentally substitute individuals for complicated groups routinely. We discuss the Kennedy administration or the Eisenhower administration when in reality many people and groups and ideas and social circumstances all were involved.
The government involves millions of people in making many millions of decisions and the leader is merely a symbol for the vast majority of these decisions.
We don't just elevate people in politics. We also practice hero worship in entertainment. In fiction super competent geniuses are great lovers, nearly superhuman fighters, superb drivers and pilots and experts in every kind of engineering and theoretical science, and know a half dozen languages.
The great man (most often a man, and very, very often a white man - even if no white men lived in a region when events occurred) myth has been presented as a lone individual doing every great deed, winning every battle, coming up with every idea and invention as if he from pure talent birthed these things alone, with no help.
The authors give the examples of Socrates, Copernicus and Galileo. Copernicus built on ideas from ancient Greeks, Copernicus used ideas from Ptolemy. Einstein gave us relativity and special relativity. But I wrote about it once and had a scientist give me examples of about a half dozen ideas that are the foundation of these ideas that other scientists had first. Einstein didn't dream up his model from scratch or as a direct sequel to Newtonian gravity. It looks impossible to get directly from one to the other. It didn't take a moment of unique genius. It took years and years of slight and gradual intermediate steps. It was like having a template of a solution to a puzzle but it can't be right, because pieces are left over and there are empty spaces you can't fill. And then someone gives you clue after clue on how the pieces could go together. The clues were presented by dozens of scientists, many brilliant people in their own right who studied the ideas of others and worked to advance the subject themselves for years.
To even take apart the great man myth more, it is possible that without the specific person we give the credit, in many cases someone else would have made the same discoveries. With the periodic table, for example, Dmitri Mendeleev gets a lot of credit but many other scientists came up with many parts of it and could have discovered the ideas he found, given time, if he wasn't available. Much of what he put in the table appears in letters and papers by others, much of it before he produced his findings.
Simultaneous multiple discoveries in science are surprisingly frequent. Right now there is a conflict over who should get a patent involving CRISPR DNA editing technology as two groups of scientists developed it simultaneously and independent of one another.
The authors contend that science in real life unlike science fiction and comic books, advances because conditions are right, meaning the information, evidence and technology is advanced enough that a step, possibly a tiny incremental step, is now possible. This is in contrast to the super genius in fiction who can build a dimensional portal, spaceship, time machine or sentient robot or supercomputer from scratch at whatever speed the plot requires.
The community of scientists function together and often progress together. They have conversations and combine and refine ideas together.
"Human memory is finite and human reasoning is limited. Students of history can understand only so much. As a result, we tend to simplify. One way we simplify is through hero worship, by conflating significant individuals with the community of knowledge they represent. Instead of understanding the enormous complexity that goes along with multiple people pursuing multiple aims and trying to remember all of it - an impossible task - we wrap events up into a tiny little ball and associate them with a single individual. Not only does that allow us to ignore vast amounts of gory detail, but also it allows us to tell a story." (Page 200)
We use a story of a great individual to substitute for the complex combination of relationships and events that make up a community and a time for that community. We as the authors point out substitute a story in politics, religion, entertainment, science and history. We use stories to replace the impossibly detailed and complex truth.
The authors pointed out our tendency to form an initial impression of a person and then to try to find ways to support it. If we see someone as successful we often assume they are intelligent. The authors point out that significant success requires more than individual intelligence.
"One common and relatively old distinction is between fluid and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence is what we we're thinking when we say someone is "smart." The person has the ability to come to conclusions quickly whatever the topic and is able to figure new things out. Crystallized intelligence refers to how much information one has at one's disposal stored in memory. It includes the size of one's vocabulary and one's access to general knowledge. " (Page 202)
The authors point out several ways to define intelligence and ways it gets broken down, such as with language or math. There are other descriptions and categories, many others.
Intelligence has a long history of psychologists attempting to find good ways to measure it. Many people from the early 1900s on have developed various intelligence tests. Something that has been discovered is that if you do well or poorly on one intelligence test you tend to do about the same on another or more clearly you tend to get nearly the same results, especially your average results, across all of them. This was discovered by Charles Spearman in 1904.
He created a concept called factor analysis. He figured out a way to take all the results a person gets on several intelligence tests and just get to the underlying result. A way to more accurately reflect your actual intelligence than any of the tests alone would find. His result g general intelligence is something psychologists like because they like having a way to measure things and a way to measure intelligence that doesn't vary from test to test is useful. Psychologists also like it because it has a correlation with success both in school and employment. People who get a higher g, on average, do better at school and work.
One report looked at 127 tests of twenty thousand people and found this result. The authors caution against overvaluing test results for any individual. A person may be influenced by personal events, such as a girlfriend leaving them or having a fight the day before the test and not sleeping well, or having too little or too much coffee or worrying about a bill they can't pay.
Remember, these results are on average for large groups, so an outlier may occur. Don't feel damned if you had average or poor results on such a test and don't feel invincible and destined for greatness if you did well.
The authors recognized the fact that the higher a person's intelligence the better they tend to do, but also have their discoveries regarding our knowledge being something shared by the community.
In this light they looked at intelligence as how much someone contributes to the community. That's a very different take than a lone genius coming up with discoveries and brilliant plans in isolation. The authors state that if thinking is a social entity that takes place in a group and involves teams, then intelligence resides in the team and not just in individuals. That is a completely different way to look at the subject.
They argue that the best way to assess intelligence is by assessing how much an individual contributes to a group's success. They state, an individual contributes to a team, and it is the team that matters, because it is the team that gets things done. An individual's intelligence reflects how critical that individual is to the team.
They go on to say, if we think this way, intelligence is no longer a person's ability to reason and solve problems but is how much a person contributes to a group's reasoning and problem solving process. They include more than individual information processing abilities and add the ability to understand the perspective of others, to take turns effectively, to understand emotional responses, and to listen. They propose that a community needs people who together can play a variety of roles to be complimentary.
They say we don't need a lot of people who get high g scores but instead need people who have a variety of different skills.
"A team with complimentary skills are more likely to satisfy all the demands made by the division of cognitive labor. Therefore, when you're picking people to be part of that team, each person's ability to contribute to the group is more important than his or her g score. Instead of measuring intelligence by testing individuals alone in a room, we need to test teams of people working in groups." (Page 207)
That is a radically different approach. It has precedents in other fields. Sometimes you need to rate a team, reward a team and advance a team based on team performance. It is obvious in many sports. A person who does well at American football or baseball doesn't play for a championship without their entire team getting there.
They use the analogy of a mind participating in a community with the parts of a car working together to achieve transportation labor. They point out that we could measure and examine the individual parts that make up a car and look for higher or lower quality parts. But what actually matters ? The qualities of the whole car such as reliability, durability, longevity and performance. Having high quality individual parts is a good idea because they are likely to perform well.
"To perform most tasks, you want people who make different contributions. To run a company, you need people who are cautious and others who are risk takers, some who are good with numbers and others who are good with people. It might even be a liability for someone who interacts with people to be really good at numbers; customers will be more comfortable with a salesperson who doesn't make them feel stupid by doing fancy calculations that they are unable to follow." (Page 209)
This compliments research presented by Avi Tuschman in his book Our Political Nature. He presented evidence that in families different children tend to end up with different political affiliations, regardless of those chosen by parents.
This supports a wide body of work that shows having dissenting voices in a group can enable members to realize a majority or especially a unanimous opinion can be wrong.
Here is an excerpt from a relevant post at this blog -
Scientologists, ex Scientologists and Watchers - Starting Out:
In the book Sway The Irresistible Pull Of Irrational Behavior authors (and brothers) Ori Brafman ( MBA Stanford Business School) and Rom Brafman (PhD Psychology) described experiments on dissent.
Solomon Asch did one of the most famous experiments in social psychology. In one experiment a subject was told they were being tested for visual acuity. They were placed in a group with several other people. The group was shown three straight lines of greatly varying lengths and a fourth line and asked which of the three lines the new one matched. The lines were intentionally different enough that the answer was meant to be obvious.
But there was a hidden element, as there usually is in a social psychology experiment, every person except one was an actor. The actors were all instructed to give the same answer before the actual subject responded. They all gave the same wrong answer.
Now there were several rounds of being presented lines and answering. And when everyone else gave the same obviously wrong answer 75% of subjects ALSO gave that answer in at least one of the rounds.
Asch found unanimity gave the experiment its full persuasive power. It's hard to be a lone dissenting voice.
He did something I have found people often do with good experiments. He repeated it with a slight variation to test an idea. He had the same set up with one crucial alteration: he had one actor give the right answer while the others gave the same wrong answer.
He found that having even one person give the true and easily observable answer made it so the test subjects felt free and confident enough to also give the correct answer, almost every single time.
The authors wrote, "The really interesting thing, though, is that the dissenting actor didn't even need to give the correct response; all it took to break the sway was for someone to give an answer that was different from the majority." (Page 155 Sway)
To really drive home this point with evidence another clever experiment is described. Psychologist Vernon Allen conducted it.
In this one a subject was asked to do a self-assessment survey alone. After five minutes a researcher knocked on the door and asked the subject to share the room due to a lack of space.
The new subject was of course an actor. The new subject had special extra, extra thick glasses intentionally designed to give the impression of him being nearly blind without them. Super coke bottle glasses.
To step it up a notch the researcher and actor even had a script. The actor said, "Excuse me, but does this test require long-distance vision ?" The researcher confirmed it and the subject responded, "I have very limited eyesight" and "I can only see up-close objects."
They even acted out a scene of the researcher asking the coke bottles wearing actor to read an easily legible sign on the wall. The actor of course acted out straining and finding the sign impossible to make out to drive home the point that he was practically blind over long distances.
The researcher explained that he needed five people for the testing apparatus to work, so it was okay for the nearly blind seeming subject to, "Just sit in anyway, since you won't be able to see the questions, answer any way you want; randomly, maybe. I won't record your answers."
But even with the coke bottle glasses and blind as a bat routine the actor was able to affect conformity significantly. 97% of participants conformed when agreement was unanimous but it dropped to 64% with the coke bottles wearing actor even if he gave an incorrect answer as long as it was different from the majority.
That is astounding. Having three people give an incorrect answer can be countered for 33% of people even with an obviously incorrect answer from an obviously unreliable source !
It's truly worth considering. Imagine yourself being like 97% of us and conforming with the crowd in denying what you see before your eyes, but that one out of three of us actually will see and acknowledge the truth if anyone, no matter how unlikely or wrong or obviously unqualified simply disagrees and breaks the unanimous opinion.
I think dissenting views shouldn't just be accepted or even suggested for important decisions that time permits careful consideration of but frankly should be required ! end quote
The authors described how a team led by Tepper School of Business professor Anita Woolley tested groups on performing group tasks together. They did a test of spatial reasoning, a moral reasoning problem, a shopping trip planning task, and a group typing task.
Remember how it has been found for individuals that if an individual does well on any type of general intelligence test they tend to do equally well on all the other general intelligence tests ? That established the g or general intelligence factor for an individual.
The collective intelligence hypothesis state a similar correlation should exist for group intelligence and performance. In other words groups that perform well as a group on a test of general intelligence should perform closely on other tests of general intelligence, especially as an average over many tests.
They actually found a degree of correlation. If one group does well at any of the tasks, on average they tend to do well on the other tasks. With some tasks the correlation is low, but it exists. Maybe further research can find types of tasks that the correlation is higher or lower in and we can learn more about how groups work together, or don't, and the about how they succeed or fail.
They came up with the c factor, for collective intelligence of a group.
With this established they discovered some other useful information, they tried seeing if individual intelligence, g, or collective intelligence, c, were better predictors at a computer checking group task. C was a useful predictor while g, general intelligence of individuals was useless.
They determined that factors like cooperation can determine group success far better than individual intelligence. I have worked on projects with intelligent individuals who didn't cooperate at all that were disasters and projects with less intelligent people who did cooperate that were successful.
The authors use the analogy of being better off with a group of semiskilled workers who work together to renovate a kitchen than you would be with a group of prima donnas who do separate tasks extremely well but don't align the cupboards and counter.
Many people who follow group sports have seen talented players who are not interested in coordinating their efforts with the team and take off plays where they are not featured or fail to pass to teammates or block in American football when appropriate. They infuriate coaches and often find themselves off teams just as quick as they found themselves on teams and talent may get them second and third chances, especially with teams like the Raiders who pride themselves on turning rejects from other teams into champions on their team. Even those risk taking teams will eventually need a reward or the risks will end.
But the original question remains. What exactly are we testing for c ? They wanted to find what makes a group effective.They found that some things have no correlation. Group cohesion, motivation and satisfaction didn't matter.
What predicted success was social sensitivity, how often groups took turns, and the proportion of females in the group. They found having more females made the group more socially sensitive and more successful.
"Nevertheless, data are starting to come in that suggest that the success of a group is not predominantly a function of the intelligence of it's individual members. It's determined by how well they work together."
(Page 211)
"The notion of intelligence has fostered a deep confusion: We think of intelligent acts as performed by individuals even when communities are really responsible. " (Page 211)
We buy into the great man myth and think a lone genius through intellect and persistence makes things happen but it's not true. Comic books tell us Lex Luthor or Reed Richards or Tony Stark alone can build a city or energy reactor or time machine from scratch, even if they have to master several sciences and invent a few more.
In the real world Mark Zuckerburg didn't make Facebook alone and Steve Jobs didn't make Apple succeed. People who succeed as venture capitalists don't back an idea or individual. They back successful teams.
The company Y Combinator backs successful teams. They look for teams that can divide up tasks well and distribute individual labor effectively.They avoid single founders.
The authors propose that for humans we have been looking in the wrong place for intelligence in individuals. Individual variations in intelligence certainly exist but as success is what we are actually after and not good scores on tests, we should look at groups.
They propose considering how an individual contributes across many groups to see how the group does with it without them, much like a hockey team having the plus-minus statistic to see that the team scores more goals when you are on the ice and allows fewer, that way if you don't personally score goals your own contribution is still recognized with a measurable stat. If you are a great player and distract the goalie and pass to teammates often, setting them up to score, you will have a measurable way to demonstrate your efforts.
The authors propose looking at when a person contributes to a group or other group, how often does the group succeed ? Not to be too insulting, but I have actually turned down "help" from people offered to assist in tasks if I knew from past experience they made success more difficult, in other words they were definitely liabilities.
There can be problems in applying this as two people who work together often may succeed because of one more than the other or fail in a similar way. They pointed out that some people are bright and can appear competent but if their projects consistently fail they are not really successful.
"The question an employer should ask is whether the projects that the employee is involved in tend to be successful or not relative to other employees. " (Page 213)
I think we can see lots of applications and variations with this. In American football two people usually have the win - loss record as a statistic, the head coach and the starting quarterback. As people who are seen as ultimately responsible their overall performance is seen as equal to victory or defeat.
Most players cannot alone cause this. I could be a great guard and succeed in blocking on every play and it may not create victory. It can help, but if the quarterback throws five interceptions and the defense allows fifty points, there is nothing I can do.
Even if I was a superb defensive player and made a dozen tackles and caused two turnovers and got a sack my team could still lose if either the offense or special teams part of the team play poorly.
That is why football teams try to put the best available player for the position on the field and rate most positions relative to success at their tasks and not team success.
In this way a project is limited to a very specific criteria, like blocking or tackling a man in front you or getting free and making a catch or running six feet through a line of men and hanging onto the ball.
It may be a new way to think of it for the positions below the top, but it has merits. If you could hire a team of people to, say for example, sell cars for your dealership, wouldn't you prefers a team that sells a lot of cars and brings in a lot of profits to a team that is impressive in an interview or on an individual intelligence test, but don't sell very many cars ?
And if we give up giving all the credit to unrealistic great men and give a lot more credit to everyone involved isn't that better if it's actually true and leads us to more successful efforts in the future ? Because we can better understand everything and everyone that succeeded in the past.
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