Demographics of Conceptual Space: Voting
Edwin Hutchins, Cognition_in_the_Wild
Eu Parliament
Another set of methods for establishing an interpretation to be acted upon by a group relies on measuring the demographics of the community in conceptual space. ..
A majority -rule voting scheme is often taken to be a way of producing the same result that would be produced by continued negotiation , but short-cutting the communication .
The point is rather that social organization, however it may have been produced, does have cognitive consequences that can be described.
By producing the observed structures of organizations largely ones in which there are explicit mechanisms for resolving diversity of interpretations- social evolution may be telling us that, in some environments, chronic indecision may be much less adaptive than some level of erroneous commitment. This may be the fundamental tradeoff in cognitive ecology.
The social organization , or more precisely the distribution of power to define situations as real, determines the location of a cognitive system in the tradeoff space.
Where the power to define the reality of situations is widely distributed in a "horizontal" structure, there is more potential for diversity of interpretation and more potential for indecision .
Where that power is collected in the top of a "vertical" structure, there is less potential for diversity of interpretation, but also more likelihood that some interpretation will find a great deal of confirmation and that disconfirming evidence will be disregarded.
Where there is a need for both exploration of an interpretation Space and consensus of interpretation, a system typically has two modes of operation.
One mode trades off the ability to reach a decision in favor of diversity of interpretation. The participants in the system proceed in relative isolation and in parallel. Each may be subject to confirmation bias, but because they proceed independently , the system as a whole does not manifest confirmation bias.
The second mode breaks the isolation of the participants and exposes the interpretations to disconfirming evidence, the goal being to avoid erroneous perseverence on an interpretation when a better one is available.
This mode
trades off diversity in favor of the commitment to a single interpretation that
will stand as the new reality of the situation. Often the two modes are
separated in time and marked by different social structural arrangements.
