Collective Induction

This chapter discusses collective induction, the cooperative search for descriptive, predictive, and explanatory generalizations, rules, and principles. As a psychological process induction begins with the perception of some pattern, regularity, or relationship. The two basic processes in induction are hypothesis formation and hypothesis evaluation. This inductive process occurs for both single individuals and cooperative groups such as scientific research teams, auditing teams, securities and intelligence analysts, art experts, or air crash investigators. Theoretically, collective induction is a divisible and complementary group task in which groups may perform better than individuals by dividing the task into subtasks and combining the different insights, understandings, strategies, and other cognitive processes of the group members.