Download The social construction of shared concepts

The social construction of
shared concepts
empirical study of a distributed cognitive process.
1. Abstract:
• Recently, different disciplines have come to regard cognition as a
social phenomenon,distributed over a group of individuals.
Sociologists have noted long ago that knowledge is a social
construction (Berger & Luckman, 1967), however without proposing
an explicit model of this process.
• In this project we intend to investigate empirically different sociocognitive processes through which shared concepts are constructed
out of individual concepts. We shall focus in particular on the factors
that influence this processes and on the manner in which the
resulting "consensual" concepts differ from the initial individual
concepts.
That, we hope, will give us a better insight into the mechanisms
guiding distributed knowledge development, which in turn will allow
us to increase the efficiency and reliability of that process.
2. Introduction
• Constructivism: reality of constructs:
reality is independent of human thought but the meaning or knowledge is
always a human construction.
– Giovanni Battista Vico (XVII)
“Verum est ipse factum”: the true is precisely what is made.
– Lev Vygotski, Jean Piaget
social constructivism, learning theory, ZPD.
– Heinz von Foerster, Ernst von Glaserfeld
radical constructivism
– Paul Watzlawick
“How do we know what we believe we know?”
– George Kelly
group expectancies as validators for personal constructs
– Herbert Simon, Ed Hutchins
sciences of the artificial: cybernetics, cognitivism, disrtibuted cognition
– ...
3. Aim
empirical measurement and comparison of:
different factors of social interaction (interface)
-online
-live discussion
-face to face carrousel
different concepts
-fruit & vetgetables
-sport
-happiness
via different measures
-responsvariability in groups
-conditional entropy (consensus/opposition)
-interraterreliability (consistency of responsepatterns
between individuals in the group, Cronbach’s alpha,
correlation measures)
4. Research hypotheses
• Operationalisation of concept: the distributed,“external”
approach (Heylighen, 1999 Van Overwalle et al. ,2003),
i.e. “a process of categorisation, whereby phenomena
are classified as instances of the concept to a greater or
lesser degree”. A concept can thus be represented as a
vector of which the components correspond to the earlier
mentioned categorization strenghts.
• Concepts are abstractions of recurrent aspects of
reality. Each individual experiences the world from its
own perspective, therefore those abstractions will differ
also, in the sense that the categories will not completely
overlap.
4. Research hypotheses
• In order to communicate effectively, different individuals
must use the same categories.
• An interacting group will undergo a proces of selforganisation (Steels, 1998, Bonabeau et al.,1998),
whereby out of local interactions a global, more
coherent pattern emerges. This implies that the
divergence in categorisation among individuals will
diminisch, ideally leading to a single concept.
• This shared concept will be “fitter” than the initial
concepts, as it will integrate the diversity of subjective
experiences in a broader, intersubjective whole.
5. Operationalisation
• For each subject, the individual concept is represented
by a vector. The comparison of the different vectors
gives us an objective measure for the spread or diversity
in the viewpoints. The average of the vectors defines the
“collective” concept for the group (Heylighen, 1999).
• After the subjects have interacted, individual and
averaged concepts are measured again.
• Expectancies:
1) The spread among the subjects will diminisch.
2) The collective concept will be consolidated:
agreed vector components strenghtened, disagreed
vector components weakened. (consensus)
3) Possible polarisation in case of strong divergence,
splitting the vectors in different clusters that could be
seen as alternative interpretations of the concept.
6. Empirical approach
• In our basic set-up, a small group (about 10) of
experimental subjects are requested to discuss a given
concept, with the objective of achieving a shared
understanding. The concept is chosen such that
everyone has some experience with it, but there remains
sufficient vagueness or ambiguity to allow different
interpretations.
• To minimize the risk for emotional arguments or political
games, the concepts were selected to be as neutral as
possible (“fruit”, “sport”, “happiness”), and the
participants are told explicitly that there won’t be any
“winners” or “losers”.
6. Empirical approach
• The subjects are informed about the subject before the
experiment, so that they can prepare their thoughts
without mutually influencing each other. They are asked
in particular to suggest a number of examples,
counterexamples and intermediate cases of the
category. We select the most representative ones of
those, and submit the resulting list of twenty items to all
subjects. We ask them to score each one on a 7-point
scale, indicating the degree to which they consider it to
belong to the category. This produces the initial concept
vectors for all participants
7. Written version
• In the written version of the experiment, the interaction
takes place asynchronously,using an electronic
discussion system developed by F. Heylighen. (Each
participant starts with a short description of what the
concept means for him or her, and then is allowed to
reply to the interpretations of others, using examples,
arguments and counterarguments. After a period long
enough to allow each subject to intervene several times,
the discussion is stopped, and the concept vectors are
measured again. The statistical comparison of initial and
final vectors provides us with a quantitative analysis of
the evolution of the concept. A textual analysis of the
different interventions provides us with a more qualitative
picture of the arguments and factors that have influenced
the outcome. The possible reasons why a particular
participant has or has not changed positions are
explored by focused interviews.
8. Oral version
• The oral version of the experiment is similar, except that
the group of participants now discuss face-to-face during
a two hour session without facilitation. Concept vectors
are again measured before and after the session. The
discussion is recorded on videotape, and afterwards
analysed for specific factors that appear to have
influenced the outcome. Immediately after the session,
selected participants are interviewed in order to explore
their unstated reasons for changing their perspective.
• The results of the ‘happiness’-goup are correlated with
an averaged expert-score before and after the
interaction. A significantly increase of the
correlation, confirms the hypothesis (fitter concept)
9. Results & Discussion
• In our two forum groups (written version) and the two liveinteraction groups about the ‘sport’-concept, we don’t see any of our
hypotheses confirmed. Only in the carrousel-group wee see a slight
significant (sign.088) diminishment of the spread. In the forumgroups the spread did not change significantly. In the live discussion
group we measured an even significant raise of the spread, but our
qualitative analysis revealed an orally negociated way of quotation,
what led to a certain polarisation. We also could measure this trend
as a diminishing entropy in this interaction. If we take a closer look
nevertheless, we encounter a very high initial value for Cronbach’s
alpha (>.9) for all the four groups, which suggests a firm consistency
from the beginning. The concept was already gridded.
9. Results & Discussion
• In our Happiness-groups on the contrary, all our
expectations were confirmed. There was a significant
fall of the spread in the two cases(.09) for the discussion
and (sign .341) for the face-to-face carrousel.
• The comparison of the correlations between the scores
of de students and the experts revealed a raise for either
of the conditions, what confirms our hypothesis.