Categories
links

links for october 2009

3 replies on “links for october 2009”

The Schwartz looks interesting – shall have a look.

I know of no research which combines detailed profiling of individuals’ abilities, preferences for processing certain kinds of information, personality, etc, etc, and some measure of group performance – group IQ profiles? Group personality? Is there a 5 factor model of group, as opposed to individual, personality? There must be something!

Every week I ask my students to read a paper and write a short summary of it. Amazing individual differences on the things people pick up on: methodological weaknesses, alternative interpretations of the stimuli, outrage at interpretations (especially this week as we are discussing a study on autism), pondering about philosophy of science, alternative causal interpretations, etc, etc… I can see that certain kinds of people infuriate others with what they find most salient in a study, then in the group discussion there are issues of shyness and desire to display one’s intellect (outgoing people with a desire to display high IQ are sometimes particularly challenging). Certain triggers make the (certain kind of) shy people angry enough to state their opinion. There’s a lot of variation in the degree to which people are willing to play the academic psychology game, e.g., many will say “Look, student samples are crap – why are we still doing this?!?!?”… with a little expansion you’d have a very publishable paper on the importance of studying cross-cultural, cross demographical, differences. Others are more pragmatic and argue that understanding students says something about psychological processes…

And on it goes…

These sorts of individual differences and group processes must be terribly common. But where is the lit that I’m dying to read? Where would I publish a study on group processes in interpreting reasoning tasks? One item on my to-do list is starting with a reasoning task with different interpretations. Sorting people on their interpretations, and then (say) pairing different kinds of people up (maybe four possibilities) to see which interpretation wins in the group output…

That robot is unreal! Charles and I really want to go to a Japanese robotics conference. As most of the work is done for companies, they don’t publish in journals. It’s all seriously advanced to what you get in the UK though.

I was interested in how communication networks affect the outcome of group processes at one stage. The research into it sort of died in the 60s, I recall, but you’d have thought there’d be a resurgence into it in these network-crazy times. I don’t know of anything that looks at how individual differences in reasoning affect group outcomes (although Charlene Nemeth (?) did do research showing that single contrarians dramatically increased overall creativity/divergence of group conclusions

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *