How Social Psychologists Are Gathering Evidence of the Hive Mind

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.

First some background. Ikegami and co base their work on a virtual reality experiment first carried out in 2009 to measure social cognition. This virtual reality consists of a 1-dimensional world—a line—in which an individual can move back and forth using a trackball mouse. This individual cannot see this world but can sense other objects by the vibration of the mouse which is triggered whenever he or she overlaps with another object.

However, there is another individual in this world with similar feedback (in the real world, these people physically are separated and so cannot communicate in any way other than via the virtual world).

The question is whether these individuals can distinguish each other from inanimate objects. When an individual identifies another person, he or she must click a button to indicate the success.

In the original experiment, there were three types of object in the virtual world. A stationary object, a moving person and an inanimate object that shadows the movement of the individual a few spaces behind. Obviously, this object moves but cannot interact by, for example, copying a movement.

What’s interesting about this experiment is that the only information that an individual can gather about the objects in the virtual world can only come from interacting with them. This provides a clean environment in which to measure social cognition, the situation when both individuals successfully find each other.

In this experiment, most people were indeed able to find other individuals, although they often confused the moving shadow object with the real person. Nevertheless, many cognitive psychologists conclude that this was a direct measure of social cognition.

This experiment, known as the perceptual crossing paradigm, generated huge interest, but it also generated significant criticism. At issue is whether the information produced by the experiment is the result of the interaction between the two minds involved, in other words social cognition, or independent of these minds, in which case not social cognition.

On the one hand is the idea that information from the virtual reality is processed in the minds of the participants before they make their decision about whether they’ve met another individual. Therefore it must be social cognition.

One the other hand is the idea that recognition of the other individual comes from repeated contact with that person, which would be easy to measure objectively. And since this can be determined without asking either of the minds involved, it is not social cognition.

What’s needed of course is a new experiment which closes this loophole and this is exactly what Ikegami and co have done. The basic set up of their virtual world is similar but with several important but subtle differences.

First, they give each type of object a different sound, allowing individuals to build up a stronger memory of their interaction with it.

Second, they asked the participants to find other individuals and team up with them to communicate. So everybody goes into the experiment thinking they are part of a co-operative game with the specific goal of communicating in some way.

Finally, they asked everybody to rate the quality of their decisions in a questionnaire afterwards.

These guys tested the new experiment on 34 individuals (ie 17 pairs) over 15 trials. And the results are significantly better than before.

Ikegami and co say the median clicking accuracy was 92 per cent and much more sensitive to contact with another player than in earlier tests.

But just as significantly, Ikegami and co say the questionnaires reveal that participants became jointly aware of each other and jointly experienced themselves as being engaged in a social interaction.

That’s important because it is not possible to get the same result from an objective measurement. It is clearly the result only of social cognition, an effect that appears greater than the sum of the parts.

That has important implications for how we think about what it means to be an individual. “These results challenge our folk psychological notions about the boundaries of mind,” say Ikegami and co.

There are clearly significant implications. “An extendible mind can partially offload the mechanisms of cognition into its environment and thereby augment its capacities,” they conclude.

By that way of thinking, we may need to revise how we evaluate are cognitive abilities. Ikegami and co finish with this: “Whereas cognitive scientists have traditionally assumed that we are fundamentally isolated within our own heads, we suggest that we are actually open to genuinely sharing our minds with the other people around us — as long as we mutually participate in the unfolding of our embodied interaction.”

There’s no telling where that kind of thinking will go.

Ref: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.4158 : Embodied Social Interaction Constitutes Social Cognition In Pairs Of Humans: A Minimalist Virtual Reality Experiment