“In the 1950s the social psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a famous experiment that highlighted the fragility of the person in a mass society when he is confronted with the contrary opinion of a majority, and the tendency to conform even if this means to go against the person’s basic perceptions.” (Solomon Asch; Opinions and social pressure)
From diversity to independence
Either by willingness to respect the informational signals shared by group members of a particular belief or by fear of dislike, people usually do not speak out their opinion. The informational and social influence can have a great impact in the decision of an individual.
An attribute that directly derives from diversity, is independence. Especially, when we are dealing with a group of diverse degrees of expertise, independence is necessary for the less experienced to not hesitate in expressing his/her views or questions.
I don’t see independence as a a form of isolation, but instead as a relative freedom from the influence of others. Having independent individuals in a group, prohibits the correlation of mistakes people make and verifies that new information will come to light. The misjudgment of a person, regardless of her knowledge degree, will not change the collective thought. Apart from that, autonomous individuals will bring diverse perspectives to the group.
Naturally I’m not implying, that with independence comes rationality and impartiality, but surely, under the correct circumstances, irrationality will not influence the rest of the group.
Independence in emergent systems and social networks
An emergent system can easily develop independence, since the constituting agents are ignorant of the overall state of the network. They are carrying out a simple, repetitive task guided by a pattern recognition system. But accomplishing independence in a social network can be a very difficult task.
In a previous post about social representations, I noted how strongly the private and public sphere can change people’s perspective. It seems as if influence were inescapable.
People are primarily social beings; they are constantly trying to expand their knowledge and perception by interacting with each other. The social web is – as the term implies – based on this function. It is founded on the principle of interaction between individuals and not between computers. Still though, collective decisions are most likely to be good ones as long as they are made by people with diverse opinions reaching independent conclusions, relying mainly on private information.
The question that rationally follows, is how can a community overcome this paradox. Creating a network, which consists of diverse, independent individuals seems not adequate enough to produce correctly aggregated information.
