The Emergence of Specialized Roles Within Groups

Group Coordination Catalyzes Individual and Cultural Intelligence

A large program of research has aimed to ground large-scale cultural phenomena in processes taking place within individual minds. For example, investigating whether individual agents equipped with the right social learning strategies can enable cumulative cultural evolution given long enough time horizons. However, this approach often omits the critical group-level processes that mediate between individual agents and multi-generational societies. Here, we argue that interacting groups are a necessary and explanatory level of analysis, linking individual and collective intelligence through two characteristic feedback loops. In the first loop, more sophisticated individual-level social learning mechanisms based on Theory of Mind facilitate group-level complementarity, allowing distributed knowledge to be compositionally recombined in groups; these group-level innovations, in turn, ease the cognitive load on individuals. In the second loop, societal-level processes of cumulative culture provide groups with new cognitive technologies, including shared language and conceptual abstractions, which set in motion new group-level processes to further coordinate, recombine, and innovate. Taken together, these cycles establish group-level interaction as a dual engine of intelligence, catalyzing both individual cognition and cumulative culture.

Radical Collective Intelligence and the Reimagining of Cognitive Science

To introduce our special issue How Minds Work: The Collective in the Individual, we propose "radical CI," a form of collective intelligence, as a new paradigm for cognitive science. Radical CI posits that the representations and processes necessary to perform the cognitive functions that humans perform are collective entities, not encapsulated by any individual. To explain cognitive performance, it appeals to the distribution of cognitive labor on the assumption that the human project runs on countless interactions between locally acting individuals with specialized skills that each retain a small part of the relevant information. Some of the papers in the special issue appeal to radical CI to account for a variety of cognitive phenomena including memory performance, metacognition, belief updating, reasoning, and problem-solving. Other papers focus on the cultural and institutional practices that make radical CI possible.

(Mis)align: a simple dynamic framework for modeling interpersonal coordination

As people coordinate in daily interactions, they engage in different patterns of behavior to achieve successful outcomes. This includes both synchrony-the temporal coordination of the same behaviors at the same time-and complementarity-the coordination of the same or different behaviors that may occur at different relative times. Using computational methods, we develop a simple framework to describe the interpersonal dynamics of behavioral synchrony and complementarity over time, and explore their task-dependence. A key feature of this framework is the inclusion of a task context that mediates interactions, and consists of active, inactive, and inhibitory constraints on communication. Initial simulation results show that these task constraints can be a robust predictor of simulated agents' behaviors over time. We also show that the framework can reproduce some general patterns observed in human interaction data. We describe preliminary theoretical implications from these results, and relate them to broader proposals of synergistic self-organization in communication.