Group Thinking VI

Social influence, in the previous examples, was limited to the case where all participants in the group were initially treated as equals (even when the suggestion was to listen only to the most confident people, that was a characteristic determined a posteriori.). But it is not always the case. It often happens that, when we have to make a decision in a social context, one or more individuals hold a special position, for example, as bosses or as authorities in the subject.


In a very famous (and also infamous) experiment, Stanley Milgram decided to investigate how it was possible that nazism could dominate Germany, when most Germans were actually not murderous psychopaths. The setting of the experiment was simple. One scientist was at the room controlling the situation while two people, being tested, were assigned to two different roles. One of them was tied to a chair connected to a machine that could be turned on to administer electric shocks to the sitting person. The task of the second individual was to switch the button that caused the shock, when instructed.


Questions were asked to the first subject and when those questions were answered correctly, no shock was administered. However, each error was to be punished with a shock, starting at the small voltage of 15V. Each error made the shock 15V stronger than the previous one, up to a final shock of 450V.


What the second subject, who inflicted the shocks, didn't know was that no real shock was been applied and that the person tied to the chair was an actor instructed to act as if the shock was real. The actor would get some answers right and some wrong, showing just some discomfort at first. Eventually, the actor would beg for the experiment to stop, showing very clear signs of distress and pain. And the scientist would instruct the second subject to keep on with the shocks, despite those pleas.


Milgram reported that, despite many people showing signs of extreme stress while hearing the cries of pain from the actor, 65% of them kept obeying the scientist up to the maximum voltage. The experiment had several problems and can be criticized in many ways, including the serious ethical problem of the horrible psychological pain it caused to the people who kept pressing the button despite their own begging for the scientist to stop. Comparisons with nazism are indeed not exact for a series of factors and the 65% figure is actually the percentage of the experiment where most people agreed with the scientist, while other problems were reported on how well the experiment script was followed (see, per example, Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments ).


Despite all those problems, and remembering that the 65% figure is almost certainly an inflated one, the experiment shows how one authority figure that we trust (a scientist conducting an experiment where we were assured nobody would actually be harmed) can make us even do actions we are viscerally opposed to. In this case, no change of opinion was actually observed, but actions were not what we would expect from normal, thinking human beings.

Group Reasoning V

The possibility of a better judgment when using groups is a tool we might want to employ, while avoiding the circumstances where phenomena like groupthink happens. That means that solid evidence on when we should expect problems and when the wisdom of crowds is expected to work on out favor is required.

Indeed, one first question that comes to mind is how strong the influence between the member of a group needs to be so that we should start to worry. Lorenz et al designed an experiment to address that question. During their experiments, they asked people to answer factual questions and, after they have expressed their opinion with no group influence, they provided information about the answers of other people. Each subject had, then, the opportunity of changing their original answer. What they observed was that, while the group was initially ``wise'' (in the sense of wisdom of crowds), the social influence tended to diminish the diversity of observed answers to such a degree that it was possible that the correct value was no longer included in the range of answers. And, despite that, the confidence of the individuals  in the social answer was increased! This shows that even weak social influence can undermine the wisdom of the crowds effect. The authors suggest that opinions should be obtained with no element of social influence in order to capture the advantages of group reasoning.

Of course, while desirable, it is not always possible to eliminate the social influence inside the group in a meaningful way. De Polavieja and collaborators, while studying this problem, have suggested that the beneficial effects of group reasoning can still be obtained, even under the presence of social effects if we just use the opinions of the very confident people, who did not change their initial opinions, despite the social pressure. Note that while groupthink can be a very powerful influence, it might not be enough to convince everyone and independent minded individuals might be able to retain the initial range of views. And, with that, the wisdom that was presented in the crowd before interaction.

Such a proposal, however, might be labeled as anti-democratic (the word democracy, unfortunately, is nowadays used even to defend positions that defend that just a small fraction of the interested parties should be listened to, arguments that use it should be read with extreme caution), depending on the context where it might be applied. The general advise to make the social influence between deciders as small as possible, however, stands. This does not mean that the different alternatives should not be presented to voters, quite the opposite. What the literature shows is that interaction between the voters should be minimum, not between the people presenting and debating the alternatives. In large societies, most voters do not interact with other, unlike the laboratory experiments and, therefore, it is not clear that groupthink will happen.

The situation is very different in committees or smaller gatherings. In this cases, the internal pressures inside the group might indeed destroy our ability to think and replace it with our desire to conform. This is not just true about the final opinions. In her work on the performance of groups and individuals, Gayle Hill also studied how the interaction might affect brainstorm sessions. What she observed was that, when people were asked to plan new ideas for a brainstorm session and bring them ready, the added independent work was consistently more creative than when the ideas were thought during a meeting.

The composition of a group is also a key factor in the quality of its reasoning. Ilan Yaniv studied how well a group was capable to avoid framing effects. Framing effects happen when people change their decisions simply because the question they had to answer was presented to them (framed) in different words. In this study, Yaniv observed that by increasing heterogeneity in the group, simply by assigning individuals to different frames, had a very strong impact on getting rid of the biases, while homogeneous groups performed much worse than individuals.

In a review of the literature in the area, Elizabeth Mannix and Margaret A. Neale discussed the benefits and problems observed under many different circumstances of increasing diversity in a groups. They concluded that there are types of heterogeneity that can make a group have problems in the areas of interpersonal attraction and liking, such as differences in race/ethnicity, gender or age. But, from an information processing point of view, diversity should be able to improve the group results, despite possible management problems it might cause. In particular, underlying, less obvious differences such as different backgrounds, education or personalities were indeed associated with improvements in performance.

The conclusion of all these experiments seem to be that there is, indeed, a lot of knowledge and intelligence in a group, but crowds are very stupid. They make mistakes individuals would rarely make.

Human Stupidity: Historical: Group Reasoning IV

The consequences of social influence that emerge from these observations are disturbing ones. I am sure that some readers might have trouble accepting, even after all the evidence presented so far on our reasoning shortcomings. But the extent to which we can be influenced by a group of people, even when that group is wrong, is something that is very well documented. In a famous experiment, Solomon Asch  proposed a very trivial question to his subjects, based on the figure bellow. 

 

The people involved in the experiment should just state which of the three lines in the right card (A, B, or C) had the same length as the line in the left card. When asked the question in the control situation, with no influence of anyone else, those who were being tested picked the correct option (line C) 99% of the times. The purpose of the experiment was to see how people would react when the information from others disagreed with their perception. In order to test it, a part of the subjects were tested in a situation where they first listened to the individual opinions of other people, who were actually actors. Those actors were instructed to provide the correct answer in some of the trials, but the wrong one (line A) in most of them. In each trial, all actors provided the same answer.

What Asch observed was that, when the actors provided the wrong answer before the individual being tested answered, this person would make the wrong choice up to 75% of the times. The effect required a minimum majority of 3 people to be observed. However, the effect did not become stronger as more actors were added, all in agreement with the wrong choice.


More recently, evidence about what might be happening inside our brains was obtained by testing the reactions of people while conducting  functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of their brains. Eisenberger et al were able to observe that, when we experience rejection, the participants showed brain activity similar to that observed when people experience real physical pain. Of course, this does not answer if people actually changed their perception of the world or if they would just agree with the majority while still somehow noticing that majority opinion was wrong.



While investigating that, Berns et al observed that both perceptual and emotional processes were involved in our brains in circumstances similar to those of the Asch experiment. Adding to that, Klucharev et al found clear evidence that our conformity to the group norms or opinions happen through learning mechanisms. This suggests that the influence of the group might actually change the way people perceive the world.



Social influence is pervasive and we are rarely aware of it. Even through social media, it was possible to detect that emotion can be contagious, without any non-verbal cues, simply by reading about the emotions of a friend. While this specific work was was criticized by the use of Facebook data without explicit user consent (implicit consent from accepting the terms of service was assumed by the authors, PNAS added a comment to the beginning of the article to point this possible problem), it highlights very clearly how we are actually influenced even with very little information.

Human Stupidity: Historical: Group Reasoning III

It is not always true that groups always outperform individuals, though. Comparisons between the estimates of a group and those of the best informed individual in the same group did not provide such a clear cut answer. In that case, the results of the experiments were not consistent between different problems. Sometimes the groups were able to provide better results than their most competent member, while, under different circumstances, the best member was capable of outperform the group.




As a matter of fact, Kerr et al.  concluded there is no simple answer to the question of whether individuals or groups are more biased. Both gains and losses have been observed as consequence of obtaining the opinion of groups. Different circumstances on how the group interact can make a significant difference on the outcome as well as the type of question or task proposed. The number of papers on the subject is quite large and, here, I will just comment on a few cases where problems have been observed. The cases I will describe are very far from exhaustive and no claim about importance is made.


A classical case of group decisions going wrong is the circumstance coined by Irving Janis as groupthink in Victims of Groupthink: A psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes. Groupthink is what happens when the desire to conform and agree with others is such that it interferes with critical thinking. In those situations, people might adopt some idea that they believe better conform to the group norms, instead of actually providing their best independent evaluation. This can happen in a variety of circumstances, from groups with a strong sense of belonging (sport fans or religious communities, for example), to cases where one opinions have a strong moral value attached to them or when people simply want to show support for a leader (for example, their boss).



What is particularly troublesome about groupthink is that, when it is observed, it is not just the case that the group makes decisions that are worse than its most competent member. It can actually happen that the group will reason in ways that are much worse than the average individual of the group would. Examples of this can be often observed in the behavior of crowds in sport events, where insults and violence happen far more often than it would be reasonable to expect if those same people were deciding as individuals.

Human Stupidity: Historical: Group Reasoning II

Group decisions happen every day. We choose the people who will represent us in the government (in several countries, at least), we participate in groups of different sizes that have to reach an agreement about how to act (assuming a collective action does happen). Sometimes a group decision can be described as the sum of mostly independent decisions and actions, taken individually, as in an election. At other times, we assemble and discuss and the final estimate or the final action is decided as a result of the social process that happens between the assembled people. And, under different circumstances, a society may move in a direction that is just the consequence of how many individual actions interact with each other, with no real sense of group decision, except as a consequence of the sum of the behaviors and their interactions. One example of this is the fluctuation of prices as a consequence of the individual decisions of buyers and sellers. In this last case, all reasoning can be described as individual reasoning, while in the first two, decisions are made as a consequence of the sum of the opinions and, sometimes, the interactions between those opinions.


While the case of how the actions of people can influence the decision of the societies as a whole is very interesting (and I will return to it farther ahead), when we talk about the reasoning of a group, this is usually understood to be the first two cases. At this point, we will just discuss the cases where some reasoning is expected from the group, with or without interaction between its members.


After so many disappointments on our individual abilities, it makes sense to start with some good news. More than a hundred years ago, during the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition, Francis Galton observed a contest where people attempted to provide the best guess for the weight of a fat ox . Of course, people proposed a range of different values, some close and some very distant from the true value (1,198 pounds). What surprised Galton was the fact that the median of the guesses was actually very close to the correct value at 1207 pounds. Later, he reported the average of the guesses was even closer to the real value, at 1,197 pounds!


This effect, where some average estimate provided by a group of people shows a remarkable agreement with reality was later coined as the Wisdom of Crowds. Galton associated this with the strength of a democratic government, where decisions arise from some kind of averaging over the opinions of many. Of course, the observation of one single case of a group estimate was not enough for a conclusion and several experiments were performed to test how well groups perform. In a 1982 review, Gayle Hill discusses the case of several papers published since Galton's initial observation. In her review, Gayle presented four different comparisons (in all cases, the results for groups included both groups working independently as well as groups where people were allowed to interact with each other): groups versus individuals, groups versus the most competent member, groups versus statistically pooled responses, and groups versus mathematical models. What she concluded from reviewing previous work was that, in the case of groups versus individuals, the groups tended to perform better, as expected. So, what happens when we examine the other possibilities (as well as other possible effects)?

Human Stupidity: Historical: Group Reasoning

It should be clear by now that we should be very careful with any information our minds present to us. While our brains do a good job most of the time, they can easily be fooled and, depending on the circumstances, will fool themselves with no exterior help needed. As I have pointed before, this seems to conflict with all the amazing achievements we, as a species, were able to accomplish.

One possible explanation for this might be in that very phrase. We have accomplished as a species far more than any individual could. Even our greatest genius were able to do their work thanks to the many man who came before them (Newton's claim that he only saw further because he was standing on the shoulders of giants is so well known it has became a common place), in great disagreement with the descriptions of scientists in fictional works. The super genius who can understand anything fast has never existed outside comic books and other sources of entertainment. This suggests that, while we do lack something as individuals, it might be possible that our combined brain powers were responsible for all the advances and explanations we have created.

And, indeed, when observing human history, this seems to be the case. Each scientist contributed with a new piece to the large puzzle, some with larger pieces, some with smaller ones. But many of those pieces only made sense in the context of the knowledge society had at the time. We have new methods of preserving old knowledge. First, for whatever adaptive reason, our ancestors developed our language skills to a level not observed until now in any other species. Later we created ways to preserve that knowledge in permanent materials, through writing and several other information preserving technologies. And we are still creating new ways to do that today. It might seem that while we can be quite flawed as individuals, maybe mankind is much more capable than we are as humans.

This poses a question that deserves a new dive into the literature of psychological experiments: Are group of people better at reasoning and deciding than the individuals? If so, are they always better or that improvement only happens under some conditions?

Human Stupidity: Historical: Memory

Our reasoning and our perception of the world are, as we have seen, far from perfect. While both of them do a good job in many of our every day tasks, they are subject to errors and it is not an overstatement to claim we should be wary of our own conclusions. This imperfection of our cognitive abilities can make us wonder if other functions of our brains suffer from similar problems.

While our emotions lie outside the scope of this work (it is already recognized we can suffer from all kinds of emotional diseases and there is no need to deal with that here), there is another function that we traditionally believe our brains perform well. That function is remembering. People tend to think of their memories as stored boxes they can consult at a later date, providing accurate descriptions of the facts we experienced in our own lives. It might be hard to find a specific memory sometimes and we do worry about forgetting, from simple information we can no longer recall to more serious pathologies where a patient memories can slowly be lost in a permanent way. All this fits well with the information in boxes metaphor, as one can eventually lose those boxes never to find them again. Or lose them for a while, until some new circumstances bring them back to our attention.

Most people, however, do not doubt the contents of their memory. If they do have a memory, unless they suffer from some delusional state, that means they believe things happened exactly they remember. And we trust our memories so completely that we send people to jail every day based only on witness testimonies, that is, on what people remember they saw or heard. And while a lawyer can defend a client by claiming the conditions of the perception of the witness were not good enough, no problem is usually detected on the ability to remember. That is, the legal system understand our perceptions can be flawed and should not be trusted, under the right circumstances. But it assumes that a healthy person will not create false memories or somehow alter the original ones.

This assumption tends to be considered true not just by the layman but also, until recently, by many psychologists. And, as a matter of fact, many practitioners believed (some still do) in the concept of "repressed memory''. That is, an event that a person has experienced in the past and have not really forgotten about. Instead, just the conscious memory is missing, as that event would probably have been very traumatic. Many therapists worked based on the idea that these memories can be recovered through treatment. And that, when these memories are indeed "recovered'', they correspond to actual events in the life of the patient.

The first indication that there was something wrong with this picture came from the unexpectedly large number of cases observed in the 90s where people claimed to have recovered "repressed memories'' of abuses they had suffered. What was particularly suspicious was the fact that the stories those people told often include elements that were supposed to be rare, as, for example, satanic practices. All those cases were recovered under particular types of psychotherapy and, as it should be if those memories were real, arrests and convictions did happen as consequence. The strange number of these cases did make a number of researchers worried that those memories, as vivid and real as they seemed to be to those who had recovered them, might actually be an artifact of the therapy.

Research followed, as it should. In a series of very interesting experiments, Elizabeth Loftus observed she could indeed create false memories in the mind of her subjects. Cases of people who had been wrongly found guilty were later observed, not only related to ``repressed memories'', but also in many cases where the evidence of guilt consisted of witness reports. Simple things like showing pictures of innocent people to a victim could cause that same victim to recognize, later, a man in those pictures as the man who had raped her. It is not clear how many innocent lives were destroyed due to our lack of understanding of how our minds work. Or how many real culprits were not identified by the same problem (for an explanation of the main results of this line of research, there is a very interesting TED lecture).

The image that emerged from those experiments is a different one when compared with previous beliefs. Our memory seems to be much more fluid than any of us would have thought. It is not just that we can suffer from problems with perception. As we learn more about some event, our brains actually change the very recording of that event, so that it will fit with our new beliefs. Missing pieces of information can be obtained from sources as unrelated to the event as a picture one observes later. What we carry in our minds is actually a mixture of what we observed, what we expected to see and things we have experienced or thought later, all mixed ("Memory - like liberty - is a fragile thing'', Elizabeth Loftus}.

In order to finish the topic of our memory, there is an interesting phrase by Steven Novella that he published while discussing the problem of the reliability of our memories in his blog:

"When someone looks at me and earnestly says, "I know what I saw,'' I am fond of replying, "No you don't.'' You have a distorted and constructed memory of a distorted and constructed perception, both of which are subservient to whatever narrative your brain is operating under." Extracted from here.