Collective Cognition

Rather than repeating myself about what I mean by "collective cognition," I refer you to my review of Ed Hutchins's Cognition in the Wild, and the introduction to the 2002 SFI Workshop on Collective Cognition I co-organized (that introduction is primarily based on an essay I wrote as a distraction from finishing my dissertation). I stole the phrase from Philip Agre, who doesn't remember whence he got it. (This is fitting.)

The workshop was my first experience of helping to organizing a scientific meeting, and quite enlightening. The focus shifted quite a bit from what I originally had in mind, but I still think the papers presented were good; many of them are available via the link for the workshop above.

John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems [My comments]
Malcolm Gladwell, "Group Think" [online]
Steve Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies, and Nations [A pop-science book on precisely this subject, which disappoints me, because I'd entertained fantasies of writing one myself. It's interesting and well-written, and I certainly recommend it. But it's limited by the fact that Surowiecki has essentially one picture of how collective cognition could work, namely averaging a lot of guesses which are randomly and independently distributed around the true answer --- in other words, the central limit theorem. This makes the cases where collective cognition depends very strongly on social interactions (science and democracy especially) unduly puzzling to him. Also, he is entirely too credulous about prediction markets. There's a good review by Scott McLemee, and another one by Cass Sunstein.]

Philip Agre
- "Growing a Democratic Culture: John Commons on the Wiring of Civil Society" [draft]
- "Supporting the Intellectual Life of a Democratic Society," Ethics and Information Technology, 3:4 (2001): 289--298 [draft]
David Braybrooke and Charles E. Lindblom, A Strategy of Decision: Policy Evaluation as a Social Process
Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence [The whole book is very good and relevant to the topic, but chapter 6 is especially salient.]
Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien, "Are Political Markets Really Superior to Polls as Election Predictors?" [Ans.: No. PDF preprint, plus commentary by Andrew Gelman]
F. A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order [Especially the essays "Economics and Knowledge" and "The Use of Knowledge in Society"]
Dante R. Chialvo and Mark M. Millonas, "How Swarms Build Cognitive Maps," [SFI Working Paper 95-03-033]
L. Conradt and T. J. Roper, "Group decision-making in animals," Nature 421 (2003): 155--158
Lu Hong and Scott E. Page, "Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 101 (2004): 16385--16389 [free PDF]
Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild
Rob Johnston, "Integrating Methodologists into Teams of Substantive Experts", Studies in Intelligence 47:1 (2003): 6 [My comments/excerpts]
Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions
Neil Mercer, Words and Minds: How We Use Language to Think Together
Nienke Oomes, "Market Failures in the Economics of Science," [ch. 3 of Dr. Oomes's dissertation (Essays on Network Externalities and Aggregate Persistence, Economics Dept., UW-Madison, 2001), hopefully appearing in journal form sometime soon]
Camille Roth and Paul Bourgine [My comments]
- "Binding Social and Cultural Networks: A Model", nlin.AO/0309035
- "Epistemic Communities: Description and Hierarchic Categorization", nlin.AO/0409013
Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior
Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach [Review: How to Catch Insanity from Your Kids (Among Others); or, Histoire naturelle de l'infame]
Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts
David H. Wolpert and Kagan Tumer, "An Introduction to Collective Intelligence," cs.LG/9908014
H. Peyton Young, Individual Strategy and Social Structure: An Evolutionary Theory of Institutions

CRS, "The Logic of Diversity", Santa Fe Institute Bulletin 20:1 (2005): 34--38 [On Scott Page's work]

Mark Ackerman, Volkmar Pipek and Volker Wulf (eds.), Sharing Expertise: Beyond Knowledge Management [Preface, 59k PDF]
Michael Bacharach (ed. Natalie Gold and Robert Sugden), Beyond Individual Choice: Teams and Grames in Game Theory [Blurb, ch. 1]
David Barton and Karin Tusting, Beyond Communities of Practice: Language, Power and Social Context
Eric Baum and Igor Durdanovic, "Evolution of Cooperative Problem Solving in an Artificial Economy," Neural Computation 12 (2000): 2743--2775
Marcel Blattner, Alexander Hunziker, Paolo Laureti, "When are recommender systems useful?", arxiv:0709.2562
Xavier de Souza Briggs, Democracy as Problem Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities Across the Globe [blurb]
William A. ("Buzz") Brock and Steven N. Durlauf, "A Formal Model of Theory Choice in Science," Economic Theory 14 (1999): 113--130 [PDF preprint]
Henrik Bruun and Seppo Sierla, "Distributed Problem Solving in Software Development: The Case of an Automation Project", Social Studies of Science 38 (2008): 133--158
Michel Callon and Fabian Muniesa, "Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices" [Online preprint, but one is told there to quote "Les marchés économiques comme dispositifs collectifs de calcul", Réseaux 21(122), pp. 189-233.]
Christophe Chamley, Rational Herds: Economic Models of Social Learning
Kay-Yut Chen, Leslie R. Fine and Bernardo A. Huberman
- "Eliminating Public Knowledge Biases in Small Group Predictions," cond-mat/0206326
- "Forecasting Uncertain Events with Small Groups," cond-mat/0108028
David Chisholm, Coordination without Hierarchy: Informal Structures in Multiorganizational Systems [Blurb]
Herbert H. Clark, Using Language [Blurb]
Larissa Conradt and Timothy J. Roper, "Consensus decision making in animals", Trends in Ecology and Evolution 20 (2005): 449--456
Mauro Copelli, Antonio C. Roque, Rodrigo F. Oliveira and Osame Kinouchi, "Enhanced dynamic range in a sensory network of excitable elements," cond-mat/0112395 [Hey, it's a start]
Robin Cowan and Nicolas Jonnard, "Network structure and the diffusion of knowledge," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 28 (2004): 1557--1575
Fred D'Agostino, Free Public Reason: Making It Up As We Go
Paul A. David, "Communication Norms and the Collective Cognitive Performance of 'Invisible Colleges'," in Creation and Transfer of Knowledge: Institutions and Incentives, eds. G. Barba Navaretti, P. Dasgupta and K.G. Maler, Berlin, Springer Verlag (1998)
Itiel Dror and Stevan Harnad, "Offloading Cognition onto Cognitive Technology", arxiv:0808.3569
Darrell Duffie, Gaston Giroux, Gustavo Manso, "Information Percolation", arxiv:0811.3024
Darrell Duffie, Semyon Malamud, Gustavo Manso, "Information Percolation with Equilibrium Search Dynamics", arxiv:0811.3023
Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work [Blurb]
Simon Garrod and Martin J. Pickering, "Why is conversation so easy?", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (2004): 8--11
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (ed.), CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy [Blurb]
Luc-Alain Giraldeau and Thomas Caraco, Social Foraging Theory [Blurb]
Alvin Goldman, Knowledge in a Social World
Patrick Grim, Paul St. Denis and Trina Kokalis, "Information and Meaning: Use-Based Models in Arrays of Neural Nets", Minds and Machines 14 (2004): 43--66 [From the abstract: "What we offer here are simple computational models that show emergence of meaning and information transfer in randomized arrays of neural nets. These we take to be formal instantiations of a tradition opf theories of meaning as use. What they offer, we propose, is a glimpse into the origin and dynamics of at least simple forms of meaning and information transfer as properties inherent in behavioral coordination across a community." Or: Wittigenstein mechanized.]
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory
Steven Harnad, "Distributed Processes, Distributed Cognizers and Collaborative Cognition", <Pragmatics and Cognition 13 (2005): 501--514 = cogprints/4765 ["there is no such thing as distributed cognition, only collaborative cognition"]
Ming-Feng He, Cheng-Rui Deng, Lin Feng and Bo-Wen Tian, "A Cellular Automata Model for a Learning Process", Advances in Complex Systems 7 (2004): 433--439 [From the abstract: "Ideas on educational psychology suggest that a learning process occurs when people participate within social communities. A model is constructed based on two primary factors in the learning process: knowledge storage and interactive ability of each person. Results of simulations are consistent with some actual phenomena including the average knowledge achieved and different educational effects under different conditions." I confess to a certain skepticism, not having read any more than this.]
Esther Herrmann, Josep Call, Mar{\'i}a Victoria Hern{\`a}ndez-Lloreda, Brian Hare and Michael Tomasello, "Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis", Science 317 (2007): 1360--1366
Pamela J. Hinds and Sara Kiesler, Distributed Worked [Blurb]
H. Kargupta, B. Park, D. Hershberger and E. Johnson, "Collective Data Mining: A New Perspective Toward Distributed Data Mining," in Kargupta and Chan, eds., Advances in Distributed and Parallel Knowledge Discovery [online]
James Kennedy, Russell C. Eberhart and Yuhui Shi, Swarm Intelligence
Norbert L. Kerr, Robert J. MacCoun and Geoffrey P. Kramer, "Bias in judgment: Comparing individuals and groups", Psychological Review 103 (1996): 687--719 [Very large PDF reprint]
Norbert L. Kerr and R. Scott Tindale, "Group Performance and Decision Making", Annual Review of Psychology 55 (2004): 623--655
P. D. Magnus, "Distributed Cognition and the Task of Science", Social Studies of Science 37 (2007): 297-310
Cathleen McGrath and David Krackhardt, "Network Conditions for Organizational Change", The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 39 (2003): 324--336 [PDF reprint]
Christopher McMahon, Collective Rationality and Collective Reasoning [Review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, which I should also read carefully]
L. Nunes and E. Oliveira, "On Learning by Exchanging Advice," cs.LG/0203010
Josiah Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens [Blurb, ch. 1]
Pettit, The Common Mind
Gabriella Pigozzi, "Belief Merging and the Discursive Dilemma: An Argument-Based Account to Paradoxes of Judgment Aggregation", phil-sci/2882
Stephen C. Pratt and David J. T. Sumpter, "A tunable algorithm for collective decision-making", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 103 (2006): 15906--15910
Joel B. Predd, Sanjeev R. Kulkarni and H. Vincent Poor, "Distributed Regression in Sensor Networks: Training Distributively with Alternating Projections", cs.LG/0507039
Yaron Rachlin, Rohit Negi and Pradeep Khosla, "Sensing Capacity for Markov Random Fields", cs.IT/0508054
Vitorino Ramos, Carlos Fernandes and Agostinho C. Rosa, "Social Cognitive Maps, Swarm Collective Perception and Distributed Search on Dynamic Landscapes", submitted to Brains, Minds and Media: Journal of New Media in Neural and Cognitive Science [PDF preprint]
Vitorino Ramos and Ajith Abraham, "Evolving a Stigmeric Self-Organized Data-Mining", cs.AI/0403001
Michel Regenwetter, Bernard Grofman, A. A. J. Marley and Ilia Tsetlin, Behavioral Social Choice: Probabilistic Models, Statistical Inference, and Applications [Blurb]
P. Resnick and H. R. Varian, "Recommender Systems", Comm. ACM 40 (1997): 56--58
Diana Richards, Whitman A. Richards and Brendan D. McKay, "Collective Choice and Mutual Knowledge Structures," SFI Working Paper 98-04-032
Henry S. Richardson, Democratic Automony: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy
Marko A. Rodriguez, "Social Decision Making with Multi-Relational Networks and Grammar-Based Particle Swarms", cs.CY/0609034
Camille Roth, "Co-evolution in Epistemic Networks: Reconstructing Social Complex Systems", Structure and Dynamics: eJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences 1 (2006): 3:2
Eduardo Salas and Stephen M. Fiore (eds.), Team Cognition: Understanding the Factors That Drive Process and Performance
Husain Sarkar, Group Rationality in Scientific Research [blurb]
R. Keith Sawyer, Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration [book's website]
Frank Schweitzer, Joerg Zimmermann and Heinz Muehlenbein, "Coordination of Decisions in a Spatial Agent Model," cond-mat/0109121
U. Shardanand and P. Maes, "Social information filtering: Algorithms for automating 'word of mouth'," in Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems (1995), pp. 210--217
Gerry Stahl, Group Cognition: Computer Support for Building Collaborative Knolwedge [Blurb]
Kent W. Staley, Evidence for the Top Quark: Objectivity and Bias in Collaborative Experimentation
Dan Steinbock, Craig Kaplan, Marko Rodrigues, Juana Diaz, Newton Der and Suzanne Garcia, "Collective Intelligence Quantified for Computer-Mediated Group Problem Solving", cs.CY/0412064
Quentin F. Stout, "Using Clerks in Parallel Processing", pp. 272--279 in Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (1982) [Abstract: "Some models of parallel computers consist of copies of a single finite state automaton connected together in a regular fashion. In such computers a self-organizing structure called clerks can be useful, enabling one to simulate a more powerful computer for which optimal algorithms are easier to design. The computation proceeds by having the cellular automata organize themselves into clerks, and then a stepwise simulation of the more powerful computer is performed. For a system of n automata, each clerk contains \Theta(log n) automata, so first they need to determine log(n), despite the fact that no single automata can count higher than a fixed number." Link]
Torsten Strulik and Helmut Willke (eds.), Towards a Cognitive Mode in Global Finance?: The Governance of a Knowledge-Based Financial System [Blurb]
Ron Sun (ed.)
- Cognition and Multi-Agent Interaction: From Cognitive Modeling to Social Simulation [Blurb]
- special issue (vol. 2, no. 1) on multiagent learning of Cognitive Systems Research
Cass R. Sunstein
- "The Law of Group Polarization" [online]
- Why Societies Need Dissent
- Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
Tarja Susi and Tom Ziemke, "Social Cognition, Artefacts, and Stigmergy: A Comparative Analysis of Theoretical Frameworks for the Understanding of Artefact-mediated Collaborative Activity," Cognitive Systems Research 2 (2001): 273--290 [Online]
J. A. K. Suykens, J. Vandewalle and B. De Moor, "Intelligence and Cooperative Search by Coupled Local Minimizers," cs.AI/0210030
Robert Thompson, Frans N. Stokman and Rene Torenvlied (eds.), Models of Collective Decision-Making [Special issue (vol. 15, no. 1, 2003) of Rationality and Society]
Frank E. Walter, Stefano Battiston, Frank Schweitzer, "A Model of a Trust-based Recommendation System on a Social Network", nlin/0611054
A. L. Wilkes, Knowledge in Minds: Individual and Collective Processes in Cognition
Jesus P. Zamora Bonilla, "Optimal Judgment Aggregation", phil-sci/2945
Eviatar Zerubavel, Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology
Kevin Zollman
- "Talking to Neighbors: The Evolution of Regional Meanings", Philosophy of Science 72 (2005): 69--85[PDF reprint]
- "The Communication Structure of Epistemic Communities" [An extremely interesting presentation at PSA 2006; not yet published]

Notebooks

Collective Cognition