Group Minds and the Case of Wikipedia

Simon DeDeo

doi:10.15346/hc.v1i1.2

Authors

Simon DeDeo Department of Informatics School of Informatics and Computing Indiana University and Santa Fe Institute

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15346/hc.v1i1.2

Keywords:

Cognitive Science, Group Mind, Extended Cognition, Game Theory, Wikipedia, Cooperation, Collective Intentionality, Coarse-Graining

Abstract

Group-level cognitive states are widely observed in human social systems, but their discussion is often ruled out a priori in quantitative approaches. In this paper, we show how reference to the irreducible mental states and psychological dynamics of a group is necessary to make sense of large scale social phenomena. We introduce the problem of mental boundaries by reference to a classic problem in the evolution of cooperation. We then provide an explicit quantitative example drawn from ongoing work on cooperation and conflict among Wikipedia editors. We show the limitations of methodological individualism, and the substantial benefits that come from being able to refer to collective intentions and attributions of cognitive states of the form "what the group believes" and "what the group values".

References

Arrow, K. J. (1994). Methodological Individualism and Social Knowledge. The American Economic Review 84, 2 (1994), pp. 1–9.

Bar-Ilan, J and Aharony, N. (2014). Twelve years of Wikipedia research. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science.

–244.

Bowles, S. (2009). Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution. Princeton University Press.

Bowles, S and Gintis, H. (2011). A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution. Princeton University Press.

Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford University Press.

Clark, A and Chalmers, D. (1998). The Extended Mind. Analysis 58, 1 (1998), 7–19. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/analys/58.1.7

Crutchfield, J. P and Young, K. (1989). Inferring statistical complexity. Physical Review Letters 63, 2 (1989), 105.

Daniels, B. C, Krakauer, D. C, and Flack, J. C. (2012). Sparse code of conflict in a primate society. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, 35 (2012), 14259–14264. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1203021109

DeDeo, S. (2011). Effective theories for circuits and automata. Chaos 21, 3 (2011), 037106. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3640747

DeDeo, S. (2013). Collective Phenomena and Non-Finite State Computation in a Human Social System. PLoS one 8, 10 (2013),

e75818.

DeDeo, S, Hawkins, R. X, Klingenstein, S, and Hitchcock, T. (2013). Bootstrap methods for the empirical study of decision-making and information flows in social systems. Entropy 15, 6 (2013), 2246–2276.

DeDeo, S, Krakauer, D, and Flack, J. (2010). Inductive game theory and the dynamics of animal conflict. PLoS computational biology

, 5 (2010), e1000782.

DeDeo, S, Krakauer, D, and Flack, J. (2011). Evidence of strategic periodicities in collective conflict dynamics. Journal of The Royal

Society Interface 8, 62 (2011), 1260–1273.

Elias, N. (2000)a. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Wiley. Second Edition of 1939 Text, edited

by Dunning, E., Goudsblom, J., and Mennell, S.

Elias, N. (2000)b. The Society of Individuals. Wiley. Edited by Michael Schroter, translated by Edmund Jephcott; first edition, 1987. Frey, S and Goldstone, R. L. (2013). Cyclic game dynamics driven by iterated reasoning. PLoS one 8, 2 (2013), e56416.

Fudenberg, D and Tirole, J. (1991). Game Theory. MIT Press.

Gigerenzer, G and Todd, P. M. (1999). Simple heuristics that make us smart. Oxford University Press.

Gintis, H. (2014). The Bounds of Reason: Game Theory and the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences. Princeton University Press.

Greenstein, S and Zhu, F. (2012). Is Wikipedia Biased? The American Economic Review 102, 3 (2012), 343–348.

Halfaker, A, Geiger, R. S, Morgan, J. T, and Riedl, J. (2012). The rise and decline of an open collaboration system: How

Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline. American Behavioral Scientist 57, 5 (2012), 665–688. DOI:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0002764212469365

Hayek, F. A. (1945). The use of knowledge in society. The American Economic Review 35, 4 (1945), 519–530.

Hazard, P. (2013). The crisis of the European mind, 1680–1715. New York Review of Books.

Hoel, E. P, Albantakis, L, and Tononi, G. (2013). Quantifying causal emergence shows that macro can beat micro. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, 49 (2013), 19790–19795.

Jemielniak, D. (2014). Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia. Stanford University Press.

Kiesler, S, Kraut, R, Resnick, P, and Kittur, A. (2012). Regulating Behavior in Online Communities. In Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design, R.E. Kraut, P. Resnick, S. Kiesler, M. Burke, Y. Chen, N. Kittur, J. Konstan, Y. Ren, and J. Riedl (Eds.). MIT Press.

Kirman, A. (2010). Complex economics: individual and collective rationality. Routledge.

Kittur, A and Kraut, R. E. (2010). Beyond Wikipedia: coordination and conflict in online production groups. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. ACM, 215–224.

Klingenstein, S, Hitchcock, T, and DeDeo, S. (2014). The civilizing process in London’s Old Bailey. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, 26 (2014), 9419–9424.

Kołakowski,L. (2008). Main Currents of Marxism.W.W.Norton & Company. Translated by P.S.Falla; first edition,1976.

Kreps, D. (1990). Game Theory and Economic Modelling. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK.

Lam, S. T. K and Riedl, J. (2009). Is Wikipedia Growing a Longer Tail?. In Proceedings of the ACM 2009 International Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP ’09). New York, NY, USA, 105–114. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1531674.1531690

List, C and Pettit, P. (2002). Aggregating sets of judgments: An impossibility result. Economics and Philosophy 18, 01 (2002),

–110.

List, C and Pettit, P. (2004). Aggregating Sets of Judgments: Two Impossibility Results Compared. Synthese 140, 1-2 (2004),

–235.

List, C and Pettit, P. (2011). Group agency: The possibility, design, and status of corporate agents. Oxford University Press.

Minsky, M. (1967). Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines. Prentice-Hall.

Oizumi, M, Albantakis, L, and Tononi, G. (2014). From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0. PLoS computational biology 10, 5 (2014), e1003588.

Reagle, J. M. (2010). Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia. MIT Press.

Sanín, F. G and Wood, E. J. (2014). Ideology in civil war: Instrumental adoption and beyond. Journal of Peace Research 51, 2 (2014),

–226. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0022343313514073

Shalizi, C. R and Moore, C. (2003). What is a macrostate? Subjective observations and objective dynamics. arXiv preprint cond-

mat/0303625 (2003).

Steeg, G. V, Galstyan, A, Sha, F, and DeDeo, S. (2014). Demystifying Information-Theoretic Clustering. Proceedings of The 31st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) (2014). arXiv preprint arXiv:1310.4210.

Theiner, G. (2008). From Extended Minds to Group Minds: Rethinking the Boundaries of the Mental. Ph.D. Dissertation. Indiana University.

Theiner, G. (2013). Onwards and Upwards with the Extended Mind: From Individual to Collective Epistemic Action. In Developing Scaffolds, Linnda Caporael, James Griesemer, and William Wimsatt (Eds.). MIT Press, 191–208.

Theiner, G, Allen, C, and Goldstone, R. L. (2010). Recognizing Group Cognition. Cognitive Systems Research 11, 4 (2010), 378–395. Tomasello, M. (2009). Why We Cooperate. MIT Press. Responses by Carol Dweck, Joan Silk, Brian Skyrms, and Elizabeth Spelke.

Tononi, G, Edelman, G. M, and Sporns, O. (1998). Complexity and coherency: integrating information in the brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2, 12 (1998), 474 – 484 DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(98)01259-5

Tononi, G, Sporns, O, and Edelman, G. (1994). A measure for brain complexity: relating functional segregation and

integration in the nervous system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 91, 11 (1994), 5033–5037.

http://www.pnas.org/content/91/11/5033.abstract

Towne, W. B, Kittur, A, Kinnaird, P, and Herbsleb, J. D. (2013). Your process is showing: controversy management and perceived quality in Wikipedia. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW 2013, San Antonio, TX, USA, February 23-27, 2013, Amy Bruckman, Scott Counts, Cliff Lampe, and Loren G. Terveen (Eds.). ACM, 1059–1068.

Traulsen, A and Nowak, M. A. (2006). Evolution of cooperation by multilevel selection. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103, 29 (2006), 10952–10955.

Walker, S. I, Cisneros, L, and Davies, P. C. (2012). Evolutionary transitions and top-down causation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.4808 (2012).

Walker, S. I and Davies, P. C. W. (2013). The algorithmic origins of life. Journal of The Royal Society Interface 10, 79 (2013). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2012.0869

Wegner, D. M. (1987). Transactive memory: A contemporary analysis of the group mind. In Theories of group behavior. Springer, 185–208.

Welser, H. T, Cosley, D, Kossinets, G, Lin, A, Dokshin, F, Gay, G, and Smith, M. (2011). Finding Social Roles

in Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 2011 iConference (iConference ’11). New York, NY, USA, 122–129. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1940761.1940778