The Epistemology of Groups

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Lackey
Keyword(s):  
Group Level ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Individual Group ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Normative Requirements ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Belief Justification ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Trump Administration

Groups are often said to bear responsibility for their actions, many of which have enormous moral, legal, and social significance. The Trump Administration, for instance, is said to be responsible for the U.S.’s inept and deceptive handling of COVID-19 and the harms that American citizens have suffered as a result. But are groups subject to normative assessment simply in virtue of their individual members being so, or are they somehow agents in their own right? Answering this question depends on understanding key concepts in the epistemology of groups, as we cannot hold the Trump Administration responsible without first determining what it believed, knew, and said. Deflationary theorists hold that group phenomena can be understood entirely in terms of individual members and their states. Inflationary theorists maintain that group phenomena are importantly over and above, or otherwise distinct from, individual members and their states. It is argued that neither approach is satisfactory. Groups are more than their members, but not because they have “minds of their own,” as the inflationists hold. Instead, this book shows how group phenomena—like belief, justification, and knowledge—depend on what the individual group members do or are capable of doing while being subject to group-level normative requirements. This framework, it is argued, allows for the correct distribution of responsibility across groups and their individual members.

Feeling like a state: social emotion and identity

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 515-535 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Mercer
Keyword(s):  
Group Level ◽  
Individual Group ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Group Interest ◽  
Social Emotion ◽  
Shared Culture ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Common Group ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Level Of Analysis

Can one use emotion at anything other than the individual level of analysis? Emotion happens in biological bodies, not in the space between them, and this implies that group emotion is nothing but a collection of individuals experiencing the same emotion. This article contends that group-level emotion is powerful, pervasive, and irreducible to individuals. People do not merely associate with groups (or states), they can become those groups through shared culture, interaction, contagion, and common group interest. Bodies produce emotion that identities experience: group-level emotion can be stronger than, and different from, emotion experienced as an individual; group members share, validate, and police each others’ feelings; and these feelings structure relations within and between groups in international politics. Emotion goes with identity.

Communication, Consumers, and Citizens

2012 ◽  
Vol 644 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dhavan V. Shah ◽  
Lewis A. Friedland ◽  
Chris Wells ◽  
Young Mie Kim ◽  
Hernando Rojas
Keyword(s):  
Group Level ◽  
Political Consumerism ◽  
Individual Group ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Socially Situated

The year 2011 was defined by the intersection of politics and economics: the Wisconsin protests, the Occupy Movement, anti-austerity demonstrations, the Buffett Rule, and so on. These events drew attention to the role of politics in the erosion of labor power, the rise of inequality, and the excesses of overconsumption. Moving beyond periodic and dutiful action directed at an increasingly unresponsive government, citizens tested the boundaries of what we consider civic engagement by embracing personalized forms of “lifestyle politics” enacted in everyday life and often directed at the market. These issues are the focus of this volume, which we divide into four sections. The first section attempts both to situate consumption in politics as a contemporary phenomenon and to view it through a wider historical lens. The second section advances the notion of sustainable citizenship at the individual/group level and the societal/institutional level, and understands consumption as socially situated and structured. Extending this thinking, the third section explores various forms of conscious consumption and relates them to emerging modes of activism and engagement. The fourth section questions assumptions about the effectiveness of the citizen-consumer and the underlying value of political consumerism and conscious consumption. We conclude by distilling six core themes from this collection for future work.

scholarly journals Measuring Dynamical Interdependence in Small-Group Collaborations

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-112
Author(s):  
Peter Halpin
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
Reliability And Validity ◽  
Mathematics Assessment ◽  
Network Structures ◽  
Individual Group ◽  
Online Chat ◽  
Dynamical Network ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Group Member

This paper addresses dynamical interdependence among the actions of group members. I assume that the actions of each member can be represented as nodes of a dynamical network and then collect the nodes into disjoint subsets (components) representing the individual group members. Interdependence among group members’ actions can then be defined with reference to a K-partite network, in which the partitions correspond to the group member components. Independence among group members’ actions can be defined with reference to a network in which the group member components are disconnected from one another. The degree to which the interactions of actual groups correspond to either of these theoretical network structures can be characterized using modified versions of existing network statistics. Taking this approach, I propose a number of network-based measures of dynamical interdependence, discuss the interpretation of the proposed measures, and consider how to assess their reliability and validity. These ideas are illustrated using an example in which dyads collaborated via online chat to complete a grade 12 level mathematics assessment.

Can Simple Group Heuristics Detect Hidden Profiles in Randomly Generated Environments?

2005 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torsten Reimer ◽  
Ulrich Hoffrage
Keyword(s):  
Group Discussion ◽  
Unit Weight ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Individual Group ◽  
Take The Best ◽  
Sum Score ◽  
Exchange Information ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Hidden Profile ◽  
The Individual

Research on the hidden-profile effect ( Stasser, 1992 ) has revealed that groups often fail to detect the choice alternative with the highest sum score if the individual group members’ information points to another alternative. We conducted a simulation study in which we randomly generated distributions of information such that they did or did not contain a hidden profile. The simulated groups solved the tasks by applying a unit weight linear model or a fast and frugal heuristic (Minimalist or Take The Best). Overall, a communication-based lexicographic heuristic performed best across the different environments. This fast and frugal heuristic makes cue-wise comparisons of alternatives while pooling information during group discussion. Moreover, results show that performance depends on whether group members share and exchange information on valid or on invalid cues. Directions for future research are discussed.

Morality

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronnie Janoff-Bulman ◽  
Nate C. Carnes
Keyword(s):  
Individual Behavior ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Group Level ◽  
Moral Decisions ◽  
Rational Thought ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Individual

In regulating people’s individual behavior in the interests of the group, morality permits group members to reap considerable benefits, but sometimes at the expense of nonmembers. Thus, morality involves an inherent tension between hypo-egoicism at the level of the individual and hyper-egoicism at the group level. This chapter describes and contrasts the hypo-egoic and hyper-egoic aspects of morality, their varied manifestations, and their development. The model of moral motives provides an expanded view of morality by describing the role of proscriptive and prescriptive morality in regulating self-interested behavior at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and group level. An examination of the hypo-egoic features of morality argues for a global morality that blurs distinctions between ingroup and outgroup, thereby promoting greater impartiality. Such a global morality requires people to forego their natural egoicism and intuitive moral judgments in favor of increased reliance on rational thought in making moral decisions about outgroup members.

scholarly journals Defending Joint Acceptance Accounts of Justification

Episteme ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Lukas Schwengerer
Keyword(s):  
Individual Group ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Group Acceptance

Abstract Jennifer Lackey (2016) challenged group acceptance accounts of justification by arguing that these accounts make the possession of evidence arbitrary and hence lead to illegitimate manipulation of the group's evidence. She proposes that the only way out is to rely on the epistemic propriety of the individual group members, which leads to a dilemma for group acceptance views: either they are wrong about justification, or they cease to rely only on group acceptances. I argue that there is a third option based on general expectations of epistemic propriety that restricts the group's maximal justification. A group cannot be more justified than any individual in the group's position could be expected to be. I motivate this solution by a discussion of normative defeat and epistemic expectations as proposed by Goldberg (2018).

Creativity in Computer-Mediated Virtual Groups

2019 ◽  
pp. 251-269
Author(s):  
Alan R. Dennis ◽  
Randall K. Minas ◽  
Michael L. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Teams ◽  
Computer Technology ◽  
Business And Society ◽  
Group Level ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Computer Mediated ◽  
Creative Generation ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Individual

Virtual teams exist throughout business and society, impacting creative generation in a variety of modalities. This chapter examines research on computer-mediated creativity and draws conclusions about the effects of computer technology across three distinct areas of interest: electronic brainstorming (EBS) groups, individual cognition, and crowdsourcing. This chapter examines EBS performance from the individual level, small group level, and large, distributed group level. It further examines theoretical underpinnings in the exchange of ideas among group members and how computer technology may alter traditional face-to-face approaches to creativity. It considers emergent research on how the computer can be intentionally designed to leverage the creativity of group members in ways that are not easy to implement in traditional face-to-face interactions. Finally, it considers how technology enables creativity on a massive scale through crowdsourcing.

scholarly journals Preprint: When Does Group Information Influence the Automatic and Deliberate Judgment of Individual Group Members?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mayan Navon ◽  
Yoav Bar-Anan
Keyword(s):  
Impression Formation ◽  
Group Membership ◽  
Relative Effect ◽  
The Other ◽  
Individual Member ◽  
Individual Group ◽  
Group Information ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individuating Information

According to some impression formation theories, when people perceive an individual member of a social group, the information about the group is activated more spontaneously and easily than information specific to the individual. Therefore, the judgment of individual group members might be more sensitive to group information (relatively to individuating information) the more automatic (fast, unintentional, and effortless) the judgment is. We tested this premise with a minimalistic impression formation paradigm that provided evaluative information about eight individuals and assigned them to two novel groups. In one group, three members behaved positively, and one member behaved negatively. In the other group, three members behaved negatively and one positively. In seven main experiments and 12 auxiliary experiments, we examined whether people’s automatic (but not deliberate) judgment of the atypical group members would be determined by the valence of the typical behavior in the group (group information) or the valence of the typical behaviors of that person (individuating information). Individuating information had a larger effect on automatic and deliberate evaluation than group information. The relative effect of group information (vs. individuating information) was slightly stronger on automatic than on deliberate judgment. This discrepancy increased when we increased the salience of group membership upon judgment, or when participants belonged to one of the groups. Our findings suggest that, inherently, automatic judgment of individuals is only slightly more biased than deliberate judgment by group information. Yet, under circumstances that are common in everyday life, that bias increases in automatic but not in deliberate judgment.

scholarly journals Individual-level movement bias leads to the formation of higher-order social structure in a mobile group of baboons

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (7) ◽  
pp. 170148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler R. Bonnell ◽  
Parry M. Clarke ◽  
S. Peter Henzi ◽  
Louise Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Social Groups ◽  
Group Level ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Functional Aspects ◽  
Single Pattern ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Travel Decision ◽  
Spatially Explicit Data ◽  
Group Movements

In mobile social groups, influence patterns driving group movement can vary between democratic and despotic. The arrival at any single pattern of influence is thought to be underpinned by both environmental factors and group composition. To identify the specific patterns of influence driving travel decision-making in a chacma baboon troop, we used spatially explicit data to extract patterns of individual movement bias. We scaled these estimates of individual-level bias to the level of the group by constructing an influence network and assessing its emergent structural properties. Our results indicate that there is heterogeneity in movement bias: individual animals respond consistently to particular group members, and higher-ranking animals are more likely to influence the movement of others. This heterogeneity resulted in a group-level network structure that consisted of a single core and two outer shells. Here, the presence of a core suggests that a set of highly interdependent animals drove routine group movements. These results suggest that heterogeneity at the individual level can lead to group-level influence structures, and that movement patterns in mobile social groups can add to the exploration of both how these structures develop (i.e. mechanistic aspects) and what consequences they have for individual- and group-level outcomes (i.e. functional aspects).

scholarly journals Reconceptualization of status liminality in the sociological theory

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-238
Author(s):  
I. V. Katernyi
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Transition Period ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Individual Group ◽  
The Individual

This article aims at filling some theoretical gaps in understanding status liminality as a transition state in the processes of social mobility. Based on the ideas of A. van Gennep and V. Turner on the nature of rites de passage, the author reconstructs the types of status liminality - ascending, descending, recursive, permanent liminality and liminoidity. The article identified some features that distinguish liminality from marginality and deviance: transitivity - the altered preliminal position and identity combined with the incomplete metamorphosis; temporality - normative temporal and (possibly) spatial boundaries of the transition period; consequentiality - social significance of the postliminal status transformation for both its bearer and society or social groups involved. The phenomenon of communitas discovered by Turner is of particular importance for understanding the state of liminality for it represents a tendency of liminal people to depart from the mundane domain into the anti- and non-structural social-psychological state in which social ties are vividly affective and social experience has a profound existential effect. For each type of status liminality, the author provides examples from the traditional and modern societies using research in sociology of death, medical sociology, criminal sociology, sociology of tourism, social psychology, etc. To conclude, the author considers such phenomena as precariat, morphological freedom and edgework in the liminality perspective. Thus, the heuristic potential of the concept liminality can make a significant contribution to the study of social changes and understanding mechanisms of reproducing social order at the individual, group and societal levels.

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