Put me in Group Behavior section

This Section: 8.0% complete

People ≠ persons, my friend

Given the context of Romney's remarks this is almost certainly not what he meant, or, more precisely, this is a subset of what he meant.

The word "corporation" dates back to the mid-15th century; its earliest definition is "persons united in a body for some purpose." You may recognize the "corp" in there, meaning body (think corpus, corpse, corps).

The word "company" dates back to the mid-12th century when it meant simply "large group of people." We still use it this way, occasionally. Think of a merry company, or of having company over for dinner. It shares the same history as "companion," which can be further broken down into com-panis; someone you eat bread with. If your company has catered lunch it is a company twice over!

I would have guessed that "group" would have been the oldest of these words. In fact it's the newest, and emerged as an art criticism term in the late 17th century. It comes to the English circuitously from the French groupe and before that the Germanic kruppaz and is a cousin of crop, meaning a harvest of produce.

The point of this brief etymological detour is to emphasize that fundamentally, corporations, companies, and groups are simply: people. That's the lens that we want to look through for this chapter.

And it turns out to be a useful lens, because it turns out that corporations of people don't behave at all like individual persons.

There are a number of studies that demonstrate this, I'll only bring up 2 for illustration. The first is Muzafer Sherif's use of autokinetic effect experiments (1936).

When individuals were placed in a dark room and shown a dot of light on a wall, they were asked to estimate the distance it moved after a few moments. (It turns out the dot doesn't move at all, but eye movement causes us to believe it does.) Individualls would consistently report the same distance over several trials — if you perceived the light to move 10 inches, you always perceived it to move 10 inches every time.

A few days later, Sherif repeated the experiment but this time put the individuals in groups of 3. After just 3 trials, the groups converged on an identical response. Here are the results for one particular group:

Later, Solomon Asch ran a similar experiment in which participants were asked to select which comparison line matched the reference line, as in the example below:

In the test groups, Asch ran the experiment with a group of 8 people. 7 of the participants were actors in on the game and deliberately chose the wrong line. In these test groups, the participant's accuracy dropped to 63%. When interviewed later, some participants felt that they had been right, but felt a stronger desire to "go along with the rest." Others had no impression that their groupmates had been inorrect. Asch called this a "distortion of perception."

There are many, many other studies examinining what is sometimes called "groupthink," most notably the Milgram experiment and the Stanford Prison experiment. These however introduce elements like authority and power to the group; Asch and Sherif are two elegant articulations of group failure at its simplest.

At the same time, we should be cautious about dismissing all group behavior as negative. "Groupthink" sounds like it comes out of Orwell's 1984 but group thinking is ultimately necessary for a body of people to make decisions and take action.

One way this manifests itself is through the bystander effect, in which individuals fail to act in part because they assume others will do so. Clusters of people (eyewitnesses to a crime, members of a chat room, rubberneckers) consistently behave

TODO

PreviousPut me in legal backdropNextScrap

Last updated