Cognitive Collapse: Recognizing and Addressing the Hidden Threat in Collaborative Technologies
Abstract
The growing application of collaborative technologies to C4ISR greatly increases communication and coordination, but poses a hidden threat. When the same set of people interact frequently with one another, they grow to think more and more along the same lines, a phenomenon we call "collective cognitive convergence" (C3). The higher the collaborative bandwidth, the faster this convergence, and the greater the danger that the group will collapse prematurely to a single perspective, becoming blind to strategic alternatives. We review previous work in sociology, computational social science, and evolutionary biology that sheds light on C3; define a computational model for the convergence process and quantitative metrics that can be used to study it; report on experiments with this model and metric; and suggest how the insights from this model can inspire techniques for managing C3 in C4ISR.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 21, 2008
- Accession Number
- ADA502908
Entities
People
- H. Van Dyke Parunak
- R. Hilscher
- S. Brueckner
- T. C. Belding