Small Groups—Part 2

Continued from part 1

Research

There may be some studies on the efficacy of small groups. A good researcher would find this stuff interesting. I’m not a good researcher, but gut feelings, if correct, should have some evidence out there somewhere; otherwise, they could be wrong. An unwilling researcher is not much use. Here are some starting points.

Bob Podolsky – Titania Project

Excerpted from Anarchast Ep.239

Short version in case you don’t have time to watch: Eight is optimal for the kind of group we’re discussing. When they need something that eight can’t do, groups can cooperate. (but make sure they keep the money until it’s time to pay for something!)

The truth is always simple, but checking it can get really complicated. The encouraging thing is that I came up with the idea of the groups independently via my own application of grammar, logic, and rhetoric and then subsequently found these other people who had done the same. (I know… confirmation bias… but as Kant said, “It is often necessary to make a decision on the basis of knowledge sufficient for action but insufficient to satisfy the intellect.”).

More Research Needed…

Additionally, these will be useful references for further research into group and network size. (All links saved as PDFs below):

Memory Transmission in Small Groups and Large Networks – An Agent-Based Model—could add some insight into advantages and disadvantages of various group or network sizes.  -no pdf **Abstract only; try the library and university.  But here’s an article about the paper from the APS site: Information Is Contagious Among Social Connections.

“[R]ecent work has argued that those within our social networks (e.g., friends, family) exert influence that is both more pervasive and more complex than previously thought. The people you surround yourself with influence everything from smoking to the clothes you wear to your life expectancy to the number of children you decide to have. The current project seeks to investigate how these influences occur, and proposes an investigation of the flow of information between individuals to understand social influences.”

from the project page in the Stony Brook Uni’s site. 

Control freaks fund these studies (with our money!) in order to understand how to control us, but it follows that we can also learn from the studies to find ways to control our own lives. 

Free Thought vs. Social Conformity has some insights into the causes of group inertia and how psychopaths use it to gain control of the group’s energy. This is extremely important to understand because the single biggest cause of group failure is parasites.

http://phys.org/news/2009-01-brain-mechanisms-social-conformity.html – a study that shows that social conformity is hard-wired in our brains. It makes sense to design our systems to take that into account and ensure that our sponsorships don’t help to introduce new mechanisms of control to the people we are intending to help.

Unanimity Rule and Organizational Decision Making: A Simulation Model finds that large groups operating under unanimity rule are less sustainable because they are more likely to exceed their critical threshold of decision pressure than small groups.

Group discussion improves Lie detection is a study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that concludes that we are much more likely to figure things out through discussion than if we just go around the table, let everyone make a statement, and then vote on what’s true or not. The advantage seems to come from talking it out, not just from averaging everyone’s individual guess together, as is the case with the increasingly common Delphi technique (PDF attached below), often used to manipulate a group into a preordained decision, thinking it was their own choice. Small groups minimize the potential for such manipulation. 

Participants in the study judged video clips of people speaking, and tried to determine whether they were lying or telling the truth. In some cases, they were allowed to discuss as a group and make a joint decision; in other cases, researchers had several people complete the task at once and turn in their individual answers without collaborating. Those groups who discussed it did consistently better than those who did not. That kind of group discussion becomes less practical as the group size increases.

Also as size increases, it becomes easier for someone to appear to be helping by “organizing” everyone and becoming the nexus of that group’s communication. They are then able to “summarize” individual inputs and obscure the real consensus. Ordinary individuals can be led to believe that they are in the minority when they are not. Such helpful people can also direct what is discussed and what is not, skewing the outcome towards their preferred one. (See the Delphi Technique PDF attached below for more on this.)

Dee Hock, Visa and Self-Organized Structures

Visa is an example of a self-organized company. Dee Hock has some interesting ideas about corporate structures and how they can be superseded. See The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock. 
Stuff to follow up on…

Attachments