Groups

[andrewducker]

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

This is quite heavy going, but if you're interested in group dynamics, communities, societies and the way that they interact together with some insights into the reasons for different internet societies have flourished or collapsed, I highly recommend it.

Comments

[magent.livejournal.com]

Very interesting :)

Magent

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link; it reminds me very much of running Furrymuck.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of one of imester's stories about group dynamics: In grad school she was in a class where early on they wanted to show the value of working in groups (I find the idea of having group-building exercises in grad school to be both hilarious and tragic). The professor gave everyone a test where they had to rate a list of 40 items from most to least important wrt being useful to helping someone survive a plane crash in the desert.

The idea was that everyone records their own answers, and then gets together into 2-3 groups of 6-8 people and votes on the order of the items. Supposedly point is that the scores of the groups are always higher than all of the individual scores because people can work together to figure out better answers.

In the case of the group imester was in, most of the people were fairly typical, except for imester (who is both inhumanly brilliant and had recently read about various survival issues as part of doing research for an RPG) and one guy that she was friends with who was a returning student who had been in the military and so had received survival training (unlike anyone else there). Individually, both of them scored quite highly and when they talked, they largely agreed.

Unfortunately, the ex-military guy was not popular with the rest of the group, and so they voted against his ideas, and against imester's because she agreed with him. As a result, the group score was lower than almost any of the group's individual scores. The professor was quite puzzled and said that this had never happened before, but the results seemed perfectly obvious to me.