medium.com
A new generation of virtual reality experiments are revealing how people’s knowledge of each other is greater than the sum of its parts
A long held view among certain scientists is that each
individual is isolated within his or her own head, that there is no
collective mind or any sense of social understanding in which the whole
is greater than the sum of the parts. For them, this kind of “hive mind”
is firmly part of science fiction.
And yet, a growing
number of cognitive psychologists are beginning to recognise a
phenomenon called social cognition, which has more than a passing
resemblance the idea of a hive mind of collective intelligence. The idea
behind social cognition is that each individual mind gains a certain
amount of information about a social situation. But when two minds work
together, they can end up with more information than the sum of their
parts.
The problem of course is in measuring this
phenomenon. How do you measure social cognition, the information
gathered by two minds, and analyse it?
Today, Takashi
Ikegami at the University of Tokyo and a couple of pals say they’ve
devised an experiment that does just this. These guys have created a
simplified virtual environment in which two people meet and interact in a
way that allows ther esulting information to be evaluated.
Ikegami
say the work shows clear evidence that the combined information
gathered by two minds is greater than the sum of the parts. And they say
this throws into question the traditional boundaries of what we think
of as mind.
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