Group items tagged

This Handbook provides a survey of the field of collective intelligence, summarizing what is known, providing references to sources for further information, and suggesting possibilities for future research.

S. I. Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action has been one of the course's handbooks for a memorable number of years already, but the manner in which it has been used has changed somewhat over the years. Although the basic concern of the book is with «informal» semantics (not the formal brand of semantics concerned with, e.g. the computation of truth-value), i.e. the «symbolic» way in which utterances are used to convey meaning, it also raises the more cognitive issue of how language affects human thought and conditions behaviour, and addresses the resulting «ethical» question of how language should be used to achieve cooperation and understanding rather than confrontation and conflict. These questions (though viewed in a somewhat «optimistic» perspective) give the book additional value as one of the pioneering works in «critical linguistics», a discipline which was to develop only much later.

In the following, we document the following types of information for behaviors (e.g., group goal setting), phenomena (e.g., team performance), or concepts (e.g., process gain), pathologies (e.g., social loafing), biases (e.g., loss aversion). For each, we list one or more of the following, depending on the richness of available research, listing both theories and empirical evidence where available: * Typology (what is it?) * Origins, mechanisms, mediators (how does it work?) * Issues, pathologies, biases (what are the problems with its workings?) * Determinants, moderators (what affects it, directly or indirectly?)