Group Think -vs- Intelligent Individuals

Stephen Pratt, a behavioral ecologist at Arizona State University's School of Life Sciences in Tempe.: "All minds, both collective and individual, have limited capacity—they have to use shortcuts and rules of thumb to solve difficult decision problems, and those shortcuts are expected to sometimes cause mistakes, the ant colonies, however, were unfazed by a challenge that often elicits such mistakes in other animals."
"These findings underscore a nonintuitive point—getting lots of information about a problem may not help decision making if you have only limited computational capacity to process it. You might do better with a strategically limited set of information. The trick, of course, is knowing what information to use and what to exclude."

What Pratt was studying is the way an ant colony makes decisions in comparison to the way that humans or other animals make decisions in situations that often elicit irrational choices in humans and other animals. In his study, the ants, with very limited information on an individual basis, made rational choices with proper comparisons on a group basis in the same situation that causes humans to apply comparisons in an irrational manner. Specifically, we will often face a comparison between two nearly equal choices and statistically choose either one about half the time -in this case a proper comparison, however, if we have a third choice that is worse than one of the other choices in some noticeable way, we often show a bias for the choice that was better by comparison with the really bad option. For example, you may be torn between two options for employment: one position pays a little more money, while the other offers a little more security. If a third choice appears offering much less security -many humans are suddenly not torn between the two choices anymore, now they tend to take the job offering the higher security.

See the report at Scientific American's website

www.sciam.com.

Mindless Collectives Better at Rational Decision-Making Than Brainy Individuals

By Charles Q. Choi


This is just one of the ways groups can make better decisions (defined as more rational) than highly intelligent, over informed, individuals. But, be careful how you apply this knowledge. Following the crowd is not always the right way to go!

-T. Troy Stark,
troy@starkeffects.com
www.starkeffects.com