The Wisdom of Many in One Mind: Improving Individual Judgments With Dialectical Bootstrapping

ABSTRACT— The "wisdom of crowds" in making judgments about the future or other unknown events is well established. The average quantitative estimate of a group of individuals is consistently more accurate than the typical estimate, and is sometimes even the best estimate. Although individuals' estimates may be riddled with errors, averaging them boosts accuracy because both systematic and random errors tend to cancel out across individuals. We propose exploiting the power of averaging to improve estimates generated by a single person by using an approach we call dialectical bootstrapping . Specifically, it should be possible to reduce a person's error by averaging his or her first estimate with a second one that harks back to somewhat different knowledge. We derive conditions under which dialectical bootstrapping fosters accuracy and provide an empirical demonstration that its benefits go beyond reliability gains. A single mind can thus simulate the wisdom of many.     

Wisdom-related knowledge: affective, motivational, and interpersonal correlates

This study investigated the connection between wisdom as a body of expert knowledge about the meaning and conduct of life and indicators of affective, motivational, and interpersonal functioning. Structural equation analyses showed that individuals higher on wisdom-related knowledge reported (a) higher affective involvement combined with lower negative and pleasant feelings, (b) a value orientation that focused conjointly on other-enhancing values and personal growth combined with a lesser tendency toward values revolving around a pleasurable life, and (c) a preference for cooperative conflict management strategies combined with a lower tendency to adopt submissive, avoidant, or dominant strategies. These findings corroborate the theoretical notion that wisdom involves affective modulation and complexity rather than the predominant seeking of pleasure and also a joint motivational commitment to developing the potential of oneself and that of others.     

Public policy and the wisdom of crowds

Collective intelligence, or the wisdom of crowds, refers to a phenomenon by which, under the right conditions, groups of individuals can render highly accurate judgments. This phenomenon has long played an important role in economics, where understanding the behavior of groups is often essential to explaining economic outcomes. More recently, political scientists have shown that trends in public opinion show evidence of collective intelligence. This article further explores how the wisdom of crowds affects politics. I look at two types of decision-making processes, those governed by group dynamics versus those rendered by organizations. Distributional analysis of financial markets and foreign exchange rates shows that when policies are determined by groups they are less prone to instabilities, evidence that in certain issue areas decision-making by groups is more readily adaptive to shifting environmental cues than decisions made through organizational deliberation.     

The Complex Relations Between Wisdom and Significant Life Learning

This study explores the various relations between two important processes in life-span development: wisdom and learning from significant life experience. A diverse sample of 375 individuals from Taiwan, culled from an initial sample of 475, completed a sequence of three questionnaires that asked them to describe their most significant life learning, the wisdom they had displayed, and the relation between the two. The 375 participants specified one of five relations: (a) their most significant life learning led to their display of wisdom (n?=?191, 51%); (b) the two were unrelated (n?=?91, 24%); (c) their display of wisdom led to their most significant life learning (n?=?67, 18%); (d) the wisdom displayed was part of their most significant life learning (n?=?20, 5%); (e) their most significant life learning was part of the wisdom they displayed (n?=?6, 2%). These results suggest that wisdom and significant life learning are seen as related in various ways. The findings shed light on how wisdom and the learning acquired from significant life experiences foster individual development.     

Scenes of shame,social roles,and the play with masks

This article explores various scenes of shame, raising the questions of what shame discloses about the self and how this self-disclosure takes place. Thereby, the common idea that shame discloses the self’s debasement will be challenged. The dramatic dialectics of showing and hiding display a much more ambiguous, dynamic self-image as result of an interactive evaluation of oneself by oneself and others. Seeing oneself seen contributes to the sense of who one becomes. From being absorbed in what one does, one might suddenly become self-aware, shift viewpoints and feel pressed to put on masks. In putting on a mask, one relates to oneself in distancing oneself from oneself. In being at once a moral agent and a performing actor with an audience and norms in mind, one embodies and transcends the social roles one takes. In addition to the feeling of shame, in which the self finds itself passively reflected, the self’s active reflections on its shame are to be taken into account. As examples from Milan Kundera, Shakespeare’s King Lear, a line from Kingsley Amis, a speech by Vaclav Havel and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments indicate, self-(re)presentation in the public and the private sphere is a complex hermeneutical process with surprising twists.     

The hippocampus facilitates integration within a symbolic field

This paper attempts to elaborate a fundamental brain mechanism involved in the creation and maintenance of symbolic fields of thought. It will integrate theories of psychic spaces as explored by Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion with the neuroscientific examinations of those with bilateral hippocampal injury to show how evidence from both disciplines sheds important light on this aspect of mind. Possibly originating as a way of maintaining an oriented, first person psychic map, this capacity allows individuals a dynamic narrative access to a realm of layered elements and their connections. If the proposed hypothesis is correct, the hippocampus facilitates the integration of this symbolic field of mind, where narrative forms of thinking, creativity, memory, and dreaming are intertwined. Without the hippocampus, there is an inability to engage many typical forms of thought itself. Also, noting the ways these individuals are not impaired supports theories about other faculties of mind, providing insight into their possible roles within human thought. The evidence of different systems working in conjunction with the symbolic field provides tantalizing clues about these fundamental mechanisms of brain and mind that are normally seamlessly integrated, and hints at future areas of clinical and laboratory research, both within neuroscience and psychoanalysis.     

‘Theory of mind’ in animals: ways to make progress

Whether any non-human animal can attribute mental states to others remains the subject of extensive debate. This despite the fact that several species have behaved as if they have a ‘theory of mind’ in various behavioral tasks. In this paper, we review the reasons of skeptics for their doubts: That existing experimental setups cannot distinguish between ‘mind readers’ and ‘behavior readers’, that results that seem to indicate ‘theory of mind’ may come from studies that are insufficiently controlled, and that our own intuitive biases may lead us to interpret behavior more ‘cognitively’ than is necessary. The merits of each claim and suggested solution are weighed. The conclusion is that while it is true that existing setups cannot conclusively demonstrate ‘theory of mind’ in non-human animals, focusing on this fact is unlikely to be productive. Instead, the more interesting question is how sophisticated their social reasoning can be, whether it is about ‘unobservable inner experiences’ or not. Therefore, it is important to address concerns about the setup and interpretation of specific experiments. To alleviate the impact of intuitive biases, various strategies have been proposed in the literature. These include a deeper understanding of associative learning, a better knowledge of the limited ‘theory of mind’ humans actually use, and thinking of animal cognition in an embodied, embedded way; that is, being aware that constraints outside of the brain, and outside of the body, may naturally predispose individuals to produce behavior that looks smart without requiring complex cognition. To enable this kind of thinking, a powerful methodological tool is advocated: Computational modeling, namely agent-based modeling and, particularly, cognitive modeling. By explicitly simulating the rules and representations that underlie animal performance on specific tasks, it becomes much easier to look past one’s own biases and to see what cognitive processes might actually be occurring.     

Wisdom and Learning from Important and Meaningful Life Experiences

According to the wisdom literature, learning from important and meaningful life experiences can foster wisdom. Leading others is one such experience. This paper explores empirically whether and how learning acquired from leadership experience can foster wisdom, which is defined as a real-life process encompassing three core components: cognitive integration, embodiment in actions, and positive effects for oneself and others. This paper consists of two studies. Study 1 investigated the learning acquired from leadership experience and its relationship with wisdom. Eight leaders in higher education in Taiwan participated in five interviews spanning 2 years which explored the lessons learned from their leadership experience. Analysis of the interviews found that leaders acquired rich and multidimensional learning from their leadership experience and that components of wisdom were involved in their learning and their application of the lessons learned. Study 2 examined whether the results of Study 1 could be generalized to a wider population of higher education leaders. An inventory of learning and wisdom compiled from Study 1 was administered to 94 Taiwanese higher education leaders twice within 8 months. Multivariate statistical analysis showed that leaders’ responses to items of both acquired learning and components of wisdom increased in 8 months and that these increases were strongly correlated. Results suggest that learning from important and meaningful life experiences can foster wisdom.     

Frühe Störungen aus der Sicht zunehmender Mentalisierung

The term “mentalization” describes the capacity to judge other humans in terms of their mental activities such as wishes, hopes, beliefs and intentions, as well as the ability to think about one’s own thinking. Mentalization and reflective function are equivalent to each other. They play an important role in selforganization, impulse control, and affect regulation. Mentalization develops during approximately the first five years of life on the basis of attachment in Bowlby’s sense. Around the 9th month of life the child begins to understand her mother as an intentional agent. Mirroring by the mother, in a way of reproducing the child’s state of mind but in a slightly different “marked” manner, enables the child to establish a second “objectified” representation of her condition besides her primary unreflected one. Consequences of lacking, unmarked, or distorted mirroring for later narcissistic or borderline personality are discussed. The child begins now thinking, i.e. playing with representations, but the state of brain development allows to conceive of only one reality. Internal world and external reality appear undistinguishably identical. This is called the “equivalence mode” of psychic functioning. As-if-games open, in a further developmental step, the possibility of including a second reality, namely a pretended one. This is called the “pretend mode” of psychic functioning. At age four to five the child has reached the capacity to take multiple realities into consideration, to take the perspective of an other and to decentrate. She now has a “theory of mind”. Patients with early disturbances have reached this stage only partially. They may also regress to one of the earlier modes of psychic functioning as a consequence of stress or trauma. The knowledge of these early mechanisms helps to identify and understand them when they appear in our clinical practice.     

SPINOZA'S SUMMUM BONUM

Abstract: As Spinoza presents it, the knowledge of God is knowledge, primarily, of oneself and, secondarily, of other things. Without this know‐ledge, a mind may not consciously desire to persevere in being. That is why Spinoza claims that the knowledge of God is the most useful thing to the mind at IVP28. He claims that the knowledge of God is the highest good, however, not because it is instrumental to perseverance, but because it is also the best among those goods that we seek for their own sakes. It is acquiescentia in se ipso, the highest form of laetitia.     

Reading other people's mind: Insights from neuropsychology

When trying to make sense of other people's behaviour we usually invoke their mental states, such as their intentions, beliefs or emotions. This mind reading ability has been traditionally investigated in developmental psychology and comparative psychology but is now receiving increasing attention from the cognitive neurosciences. I will show the important role that neuropsychology plays in unravelling the cognitive and neural basis of our mind reading abilities. I will illustrate this by showing how cases of adults with acquired brain lesions can help us tease apart the different mechanisms that underlie mind reading abilities and can help us understand the nature of these mechanisms, especially their relation to language and executive function.     

The Neural Architecture of General Knowledge

Cognitive performance varies widely between individuals and is highly influenced by structural and functional properties of the brain. In the past, neuroscientific research was principally concerned with fluid intelligence, while neglecting its equally important counterpart crystallized intelligence. Crystallized intelligence is defined as the depth and breadth of knowledge and skills that are valued by one's culture. The accumulation of crystallized intelligence is guided by information storage capacities and is likely to be reflected in an individual's level of general knowledge. In spite of the significant role general knowledge plays for everyday life, its neural foundation largely remains unknown. In a large sample of 324 healthy individuals, we used standard magnetic resonance imaging along with functional magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion tensor imaging to examine different estimates of brain volume and brain network connectivity and assessed their predictive power with regard to both general knowledge and fluid intelligence. Our results demonstrate that an individual's level of general knowledge is associated with structural brain network connectivity beyond any confounding effects exerted by age or sex. Moreover, we found fluid intelligence to be best predicted by cortex volume in male subjects and functional network connectivity in female subjects. Combined, these findings potentially indicate different neural architectures for information storage and information processing. © 2019 European Association of Personality Psychology     

读心的比较研究：非人灵长类与人类在心理理论上的异同点及其解释

利用非人灵长类开展比较研究是探索心理理论本质、起源和进化动因的重要途经。大量实证研究显示非人灵长类可以表现出一些基础心理理论成分,包括联合注意、意图理解和一级观点采择,这表明心理理论在灵长类动物的进化谱系中具有进化连续性。然而,非人灵长类无法像人类一样达成二级观点采择和错误信念理解,潜心智化假说、替代表征假说、最小限度心理理论假说和意识关系假说试图对此差异进行解释。尽管视角与具体内容不同,但这些假说都强调,非人灵长类无法对其他个体关于外部世界的心理信念形成表征,信念表征是非人灵长类与人类读心能力的重要分界点。未来研究需要重点澄清共享意图、语言机制以及社会生态环境因素与心理理论产生的相互影响作用。     

智慧的特质论与状态论：分歧、统整与新解

特质论与状态论之争是智慧研究领域新兴的热门话题。特质论认为智慧是稳定且不易干预的人格特质;状态论认为智慧是一种相对容易波动的心智状态,短期内可以改变且容易受外在情境的影响。基于人格心理学研究的“密度分布说”则为特质论与状态论之争提供了系统的整合模型。受此启发,本研究在以往理论的基础上提出“特质-状态正态分布假说”,旨在进一步补充完善“密度分布说”并为特质论与状态论研究提供新的理论视角。未来研究仍需结合多种智慧测量手段,加强纵向追踪研究,探索智慧本质观与密度分布说的关系,开展相应的跨文化研究。     

Future avenues for education and neuroenhancement

Education, in epistemological terms, presents an arena in which the development of knowledge and its transmission frame fundamentally distinct assignments: in social contexts knowledge exchange is prioritised to equip individuals as knowers; in theoretical contexts, an understanding of knowing as a state of mind is the primary objective. Distinguishing between education and its institutionalised product –the school–, this paper reviews the notion that today's modern classroom settings limit the applicability of neuroscience research by focusing on equipping individuals as knowers. In contrast, educational research has become increasingly grounded in brain sciences, with future premises examining artificial intelligence technologies (AI) targeted at enhancing learning and memory based on an understanding of the nature of knowing. Taking into account this bifurcation between education and school, this paper examines how the paths of educational, neuroscience, and AI research cross beyond school-enabled learning. This is contemplated across three sections. The first section examines the historical basis of the bifurcation between education and schooling. The second reviews the potential impacts of current neuroscience knowledge on educational implementations. The third discusses how and why neuroscience and AI technologies could be pertinent to educational discourse in the future.     

智者一定自我超越吗？智慧与自我超越的关系

智慧与自我超越的关系紧密虽毋庸置疑,但其关系模式存在三种观点：自我超越是智慧表现的影响因素;自我超越是智慧的一个方面或子类型;自我超越是智慧心理过程的核心。三种观点的分歧源自智慧定义的不同取向,在各自的理论体系中都有其合理性。本研究以自我超越式的智慧自我为核心的智慧自我-人格-表现多层模型整合了现有的智慧与自我超越关系的多种观点,在发现每种观点更适宜的解释水平及其背后意义的同时,为进一步探究智慧多层内涵提供了可能方向。     

The Development and Validation of a Personological Measure of Work Drive

Using six studies based on 23,823 individuals in diverse settings, we developed and validated a personality measure of Work Drive—a disposition to work long hours and extend oneself for one's job. The factor structure was confirmed in four settings. Work Drive was related to job performance showing incremental validity beyond cognitive aptitude and Big Five personality traits in five validation studies. It predicted academic performance at six different grade levels, even beyond Big Five traits. Construct validity was examined via work values, job involvement, normal personality scales, satisfaction measures, and cognitive ability. Little adverse impact was found. Occupational groups differed on Work Drive. Overall validity and areas of application were discussed.     

Brain-to-brain coupling: a mechanism for creating and sharing a social world

Cognition materializes in an interpersonal space. The emergence of complex behaviors requires the coordination of actions among individuals according to a shared set of rules. Despite the central role of other individuals in shaping one's mind, most cognitive studies focus on processes that occur within a single individual. We call for a shift from a single-brain to a multi-brain frame of reference. We argue that in many cases the neural processes in one brain are coupled to the neural processes in another brain via the transmission of a signal through the environment. Brain-to-brain coupling constrains and shapes the actions of each individual in a social network, leading to complex joint behaviors that could not have emerged in isolation.     

Beyond the Institutionalized Fetish of the “Neurosciences”: Taking Brain Seriously

In their book Kritik der Neuropsychologie (Giessen: Psychosozial Verlag, 2016, 123 pp. ISBN 978–3–8379-2563-0), Hans Werbik and Gerhard Benetka provide a thorough analysis of the modus operandi of our contemporary neurosciences and their success in promising the public and funding institutions great breakthroughs in understanding the human mind through the study of the brain. As the authors prove such promises are inadequate given the qualities of the human psyche that cannot be reduced to the complex mechanisms of the activation of brain circuits because there cannot be isomorphism between the brain and the ongoing dynamic relating of the mind with the flow of subjective experiencing. The authors provide a scenario for possible solutions coming from cultural psychology which need further advancement of psychology’s methodology.