[FRIAM] Emergence blindness as an Adaptive Trait

[Nicholas Thompson]

All, particularly those in the Home Church. 

On Wednesday, we got into it about emergence and so I thought I would offer the attached file  from a few years back, when the Bush administration was still an ugly rumor. 

.  Here is the abstract, in case you aren't awash in free time. 

Nick 
 
ABSTRACT. We [me and two reluctant colleagues] hypothesize that, because human minds are ill prepared by natural selection to perceive emergence, the achievements of groups that arise from their good functioning as groups easily goes unnoticed. This perceptual flaw has been an obstacle for developmental science, as  it has been  for biologists who want to look at the productivity of groups as opposed to the productivity of the individuals that make them up.  Humans tend either (1) to attribute the non-additive productivity of the group to one of its members, investing him or her with special powers of “leadership”, or (2 ) to invent an additional supernatural member of the group -- a spirit or god -- to account for its hyper-productivity.   Either method of resolving the cognitive problem posed by emergence is likely to make the group’s individuals more readily subject to the demands of group members who appear to embody or speak for the source of this hyper-productivity.  Thus, selection at the group level will favor such cognitive misattributions because they make groups more coherent and enhance their emergent qualities.  
 




Nicholas S. Thompson
Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthompson at clarku.edu)
Research Associate, Redfish Group, Santa Fe, NM (nick at redfish.com)
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