Wednesday, January 01, 2003

Cohesion - What is it and what makes it work? Cohesion has a good and a dark side "Conceptualising themselves as belonging to the group, and considering their goals to be aligned with it, members of a cohesive group are prepared to sacrifice their immediate self-interest for the overall good of the group. There is a sense of service, illustrated by the oath which youths swore at the age of 18 during the Athenian heyday: I will hand on my fatherland, not diminished but larger and better. Similarly, during the second world war, American soldiers expressed a desire to stay with their unit rather than be promoted elsewhere or go on sick leave, for fear of 'letting the other guys down'. Obviously, when all the members of a group feel like this it stands an elevated chance of success at whatever task it sets itself. There is less bickering and conflict, such as would slow the group down and divert its energies. Instead, there is a greater sense of purpose and commitment, and mutual supporting to help all members realise their potential. During the Korean war, for instance, allied prisoners were subjected to a programme of brainwashing intended to break down their spirit and cause them to embrace communism. There was widespread collaboration, morale of the allied prisoners was generally lower than in any previous war and many died in captivity. However, one nation proved an exception. The Turkish prisoners avoided this general syndrome by maintaining a high level of cohesion. The senior Turkish officer informed his Korean captors 'I am responsible for the Turkish soldiers. If you want anything doing you come to me and I will relay your orders to my men. If you do not like this, you can kill me. Then my second-in-command will be responsible. You can kill him too but then the third senior officer will take over. And so on down the chain of command until there are only two privates left. Then the senior private will be in charge.' This attitude was reiterated by the soldiers, who exerted pressure on each other to ensure that they continued to obey their officers. The Turks were targeted for brainwashing just like the other allied prisoners. However, they resisted strongly, heckling and making insulting remarks that wore down their captors. Hardly a single one was guilty of even minor degrees of collaboration and although almost half the men were wounded before capture, none died in the camps. In one temporary camp, where none of the 110 Turks died, the Americans lost 400-800 men out of a total of 1500-1800 interned. The Americans themselves attributed this remarkable result to the Turkish cohesion in contrast to their own discohesion. Interestingly, the principles involved here - united we stand, divided we fall - are captured in the fascist symbol of a bundle of rods (fasces). Separately, the rods may be easily broken. But when they are put together, aligned in the same direction, they are highly resistant. This is interesting because the negative connotations of fascism recall the conservative and oppressive aspect of social cohesion. And this conservatism of a cohesive group can also be a disadvantage. It suppresses initiative and intellectual diversity. When the group faces new and unexpected difficulties, it may find it difficult to generate innovative solutions. Thus, cohesion may prove advantageous in the short run, for dealing with immediate problems, but disadvantageous in the long run when more creative thinking is required." 3:57:28 PM    comment []

150 - The magic number Summary of Dunbar's Work on the Magic Number Is the issue of Cohesion not directly connected to this idea? Is our ignorance of this need to belong a root cause of much of our workplace depression and illness? 2:04:52 PM    comment []

Robin Dunbar - The King of Magic Number Theory - By Malcolm Gladwell an Ace Journalist Malcolm Gladwell on Robin Dunbar's work on Magic Numbers "At a certain point, at somewhere between 10 and 15 people, we begin to overload, just as we begin to overload when we have to distinguish between too many tones.     It's a function of the way humans are constructed. Man evolved to feel strongly about few people, short distances, and relatively brief intervals of time; and these are still the dimensions of life that are important to him."     Perhaps the most interesting natural limit, however, is what might be called our social channel capacity. The case for a social capacity has been made, most persuasively, by the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar. Dunbar begins with a simple observation. Primates - monkeys, chimps, baboons, humans - have the biggest brains of all mammals. More important, a specific part of the brain of humans and other primates - the region known as the neocortex, which deals with complex thought and reasoning - is huge by mammal standards.     If you belong to a group of five people, Dunbar points out, you have to keep track of 10 separate relationships: your relationships with the four others in your circle and the six other two-way relationships between the others. That's what it means to know everyone in the circle. You have to understand the personal dynamics of the group, juggle different personalities, keep people happy, manage the demands on your own time and attention, and so on.    If you belong to a group of 20 people, however, there are now 190 two-way relationships to keep track of. 19 involving yourself and 171 involving the rest of the group. That's a fivefold increase in the size of the group, but a twenty fold increase in the amount of information processing needed to "know' the other members of the group. Even a relatively small increase in the size of a group, in other words, creates additional significant social and intellectual burden.     Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement. Dunbar has actually developed an equation, which works for most primates, in which he plugs in what he calls the neocortex ratio of a particular species - the size of the neocortex relative to the size of the brain - and the equation spits out the expected maximum group size of the animal. If you plug in the neocortex ratio for Homo sapiens, you get a group estimate of 147.8 - or roughly 150.    "The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, it's the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar."     Dunbar has combed through the anthropological literature and found that the number 150 pops up again and again. For example, he looks at 21 different hunter-gatherer societies for which we have solid historical evidence, from the Walbiri of Australia to the Tauade of New Guinea to the Ammassalik of Greenland to the Ona of Tierra del Fuego and found that the average number of people in their villages was 148.4. The same pattern holds true for military organization. "Over the years military planners have arrived at a rule of thumb which dictates that functional] fighting units cannot be substantially larger than 200 men," Dunbar writes. "This, I suspect, is not simply a matter of how the generals in the rear exercise control and coordination, because companies have remained obdurately stuck at this size despite all the advances in communications technology since the First World War. Rather, it is as though the planners have discovered, by trial and error over the centuries, that it is hard to get more than this number of men sufficiently familiar with each other so that they can work together as a functional unit."    It is still possible, of course, to run an army with larger groups. But at a bigger size you have to impose complicated hierarchies and rules and regulations and formal measures to try to command loyalty and cohesion. But below 150, Dunbar argues, it is possible to achieve these same goals informally: "At this size, orders can be implemented and unruly behaviour controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts. With larger groups, this becomes impossible." 1:34:56 PM    comment []