Mark Klein is one of the scientists leading the Climate Collaboratorium project at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in the United States. For more than a quarter of a century, he has studied man’s collective intelligence. Interview:
-Climates: Collective intelligence is not perfect and can lead to grave errors, as was the case with the space shuttle Challenger disaster. Collective decisions can even be less shrewd than individual decisions. How is this possible?
- Mark Klein: Mainly three factors can lead a group to an erroneous decision: 1) information on the situation is not taken into account because of social or political pressure; 2) points of view that have been expressed early in the deliberation process can have a disproportionate impact on the final outcome, eclipsing more accurate or useful contributions that came later. Indeed, people will have the feeling that a commonly accepted view is right and that it is therefore not necessary to investigate it. 3) Groups have a tendency to polarize, i.e. to uphold more and more extreme opinions. These error amplifications are due to the fact that humans tend to believe that an affirmation is true if a large number of persons purportedly do so. The rationale typically is: “how can all these people be wrong?”Social pressure also plays a role. It is determined by peer influences such as fear of conflict, fear of being ridiculed or marginalized by the group. Then the individual becomes servile vis-à-vis his superiors in an opportunistic attitude. He hopes by this means to satisfy his desire to be part of a community with which he shares a common outlook on reality. In this way, he creates a social identity for himself in feeling to be part of a clan. Members will then adopt a shared ideological approach and will mutually reinforce their views. These two phenomena lead to conformism. Its result is that it is no longer possible to explore a large enough number of solutions. The group then makes a decision very quickly. In these conditions, the probability that errors will spread and that the group will come to bad decisions increases significantly.
-C.: Are these factors at work in the climate change debate?
-M. K.: Yes. About this theme, one can for example observe the phenomenon of conformism generated by social pressure we have just discussed. To illustrate this point, one can take the case of the individuals who think that climate change will not have problematic consequences for humanity. They are essentially in contact with people who share the same opinion. This will have the effect of reinforcing their point of view. We encounter the same situation with those who consider that climate change will cause a disaster. Although the work done by the scientific community is of good quality, we see as regards the political sphere and the media that the interactions about this issue are incoherent and dispersed. There is no clear way to converge on well-supported decisions concerning this problem. A worrying point is that the information on climate change is essentially transmitted by the media, whose purpose is not to concentrate on science but on stories likely to capture the reader’s attention. Globally, what one witnesses is the failure of collective intelligence faced with this problem!
It is for this reason that we're developing a new type of highly sophisticated discussions and forums on the Internet at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Called Climate Collaboratorium, they will improve the quality of the decision-making process primarily with regard to climate change. The idea is to use computer technology to harness collective intelligence, i.e. to create channels enabling the accumulation and the synergy of the vast human and technological resources for decision-making purposes. In other words, it will permit people of all backgrounds to state their opinion. It will be possible to compare the latter and the arguments that underlie them. In this way, we will have a wider range of views than anywhere else.
We have just completed a real-life deployment of this system to test it. This experiment took place in Zurich (Switzerland). We worked with 300 students divided into 3 groups. One used the Collaboratorium, whereas the two others employed other collective intelligence tools. We are currently analyzing the results.
The Collaboratorium will allow us to go beyond the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) work, listing thousands and thousands of ideas. In the long run, the goal is to create an electronic democracy that would exceed our present means, which only enable the citizen to vote yes or no about small numbers of simplified alternatives. This system would make reasoned collective decision-making about highly complex issues possible.
- C.: Is the democratic system the most appropriate to deal with the issue of climate change?
- M. K. Yes, democracy is conducive to grasp complex problems. The reason for this is that it employs a vast number of brains in the consideration of an issue, which is not the case for hierarchical systems. On the other hand, monarchies and dictatorships are more effective for the resolution of simple but large-scale sets of problems.
- M. K. Yes, democracy is conducive to grasp complex problems. The reason for this is that it employs a vast number of brains in the consideration of an issue, which is not the case for hierarchical systems. On the other hand, monarchies and dictatorships are more effective for the resolution of simple but large-scale sets of problems.
- C.: Could the Collaboratorium become challenging depending on the conclusions that it reaches?
- M. K.: Yes, there are people who benefit from the fact that questions are not asked. This allows them to restrict the debate to the options that they prefer. The Collaboratorium will come into direct conflict with them.
- C.: Ants have a great collective intelligence. In biology, one even uses the notion of superorganism to refer to the different ants of a nest interacting. Are they collectively smarter than humankind?
-M. K.: Yes. A great collective intelligence means that the community is a lot smarter than the individuals who make it up. In these insects, the colony is remarkably intelligent, but this is not the case for individuals taken separately. This results from simple but well-thought-out rules that these arthropods follow in their interactions. In mankind, this is the opposite: human beings are intelligent, whereas society is globally stupid. Regarding this, MIT is in the process of developing measures of collective intelligence quotient for the global brain, as is the case with IQ (intelligence quotient) for individual brains. In the future, this innovation should allow using effective organizations according to the kind of topic that one wants to treat and the available resources. Such a development will of course also apply to the climate change problem.
Gaëtan Dübler
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