Group Think, Transactive Memory, and Surveillance

Group Think is an odd theory. It refers to when groups are overly cohesive, in the sense that they are hesitant to critique each others weak ideas. Because they are thinking too much about the group and not enough about the task at hand, the results produced are often lacking. The group inadequately analyzes the problem, causing them to limit their solutions. Whenever i think of issues like this one in relation to surveillance, it reminds me of technological dystopias and movies like Equilibrium and the Matrix. In Equilibrium, government groups come up with the solution to eliminate emotion in order to bring peace to the nations. Ideas that come from group think are often smart, but it is usually very easy to spot the problems.
I hope that most of our governmental decisions are produced using transactive memory. Groups that use transactive memory feed off of each other by triggering each others good ideas. They are able to call upon more information in order to form a solution. This makes their solutions better suited for the initial problem. These groups tend to be more dynamic. In terms of surveillance, our government has probably come up with many ways to watch us, without us feeling like were being watched. Though this point can be argued, they have to respect certain lines of privacy and have complied to doing so.

Experian Problems (Fan, please respond)

After answering the identity security questions, I got this message:

For security reasons, we are unable to provide immediate access to your personal credit report. However, within 24 business hours we will mail you a letter with a special Report Number and a link so that you may return to our site to view your report instantly. To continue your order, select "Yes" below. If you select "No" you will need to call 1 877 FACTACT (1 877 322 8228) to order your report for delivery by U.S. mail, or request your report in writing using the request form at www.annualcreditreport.com.

What should I do?

Groupthink/Transactive Memory + Gaming

Group think is when a group of people work together, collectively towards one common goal – but with minimum conflict. This can be beneficial to a group because when all members are aware of the way the work within the group in order to be more effective, the overall out come can be better than one person working, or several people working without concern for others. However, when everyone is trying to get along – and work together, there can be serious retardations in the progress of the group in terms or originality and “out of the box” thinking. If everyone is trying to get along, then they will all try to stay within one range to keep everyone happy, this approach with limit the amount of conflict, but prove very ineffective for coming up with new, innovative techniques. Because no one is really explaining why they think what the think, further developments in each thought will be hindered by a lack of communication. If one were to take the ideas of someone else, and modify them, then real progress would be possible. In something like group think, the “to each his own” mentality will not open its self to combined thoughts and original solutions.
Transactive memory is a useful process where each person in the group is kind of responsible for remembering, and mastering their own area. Though disadvantages can come out of this, I believe this is more a positive, helpful technique than a harmful one.
Both these techniques are obvious in the gaming world. In order to work as a team, in person or virtually, people must compensate and compromise. Using both transactive memory and group think, people are able to collaborate effectively, and quickly, in order to achieve what ever it is they are working towards.

This Friday

Hi, all:

For this week, please bring your writing on the group think and transactive memory to the class, we will go through that since we didn't manage to do that last week. Besides, please go to blackboard and write down all the scores you've achieved up till now and bring it to me, I'll work with each of you to see how we could improve your final score based on that.

Thank you!

Fan

groupthink/transactive memory

Group think is suppose to allow a groups of individuals to work together to reach a common goal without conflict--however, when too many people in a group start to think alike to reach consensus, they may discount opposing views. For the world of gaming, group think can be benefit because people work/play together on game to develop and improve it to win. However, this does not allow room for an individual to progress on his or her own and may actually hamper the development new strategies to win.

With transactive memory, the idea is that people have certain pieces of information which they can recall on their own. Working as a group, each member is to know each others specific knowledge and apply it within some context to accomplish a common goal. With gaming, you can have certain players do certain things to win the game.

Assignment 3

When is this due?

Problems with Experian

Hey,
For the past two days, i've been repeatedly trying to do the Credit Report assignment and each time, have received an error message. After filling out the initial form and selecting Experian, they say they cannot access the report at this time and to try again later. I was wondering if anyone else had encountered this error message?
Thanks

Instructions for assignment 3

The goal of this assignment is to obtain a copy of your credit report, examine the information in the report for errors. This assignment requires you to navigate through the websites, and the steps are detailed below. Be ready to print the web pages you accessed. So be sure you are connected to a printer.


STEP 1

To obtain a free copy of your credit report, go to https://www.annualcreditreport.com

NOTE 1: It is important that you use the above link to get to the correct site.
You will be providing sensitive information (e.g. your Social Security Number and date of birth) in the process of getting a credit report.

There are many other sites that take advantage of this fact, and tries to pass off as the above site. A few of such impostor sites are motivated by CRIMINAL intentions. So, be careful.

NOTE 2: Where and when you can, you should access the site with your own personal computer (as opposed to a public computer) using a wired connection or an encrypted wireless connection.


On the first page, select the appropriate state. If you grew up in California, then select California. If you did not, then choose the state in which you most often use credit.

Example 1: If you lived most of your life in Seattle, Washington, but you have applied for most of your credit cards in California using a California address, you should select California as the state.

Example 2: If your parents live in Seattle, Washington, and they allowed you to use their credit card, then you should select Washington as the state.


After you have selected the state, click the button “Request Report”.



STEP 2

The next page should read “PLEASE PROVIDE ALL OF THE PERSONAL INFORMATION REQUIRED BELOW”.

Enter your personal information.

NOTE: Check the box to indicate that you want no more than the last four digits of your Social Security Number to appear when you view or print your credit report.



STEP 3

This page asks you to select one or more of the consumer credit reporting agencies.

For this assignment, choose Experian only.

Click Next to continue.



STEP 4

This page says “Click NEXT to continue. You will be transferred to the Experian site.”
It tells you how to return to the AnnualCreditReport.com site.

Click NEXT to go to the Experian site.



STEP 5

This page asks you for the last four digits of your SSN. Enter the digits and click Submit
The next page asks if you want to buy a credit monitoring service. There is no need to do so. Scroll down and click the grey button “Annual Credit Report”.
The next page is an order summary. Click on the link “Terms & Conditions”. Read it. Then check the box, and click the red button “Submit”.


STEP 6

You may be asked to answer certain questions about your credit history. So, give the right answers and click Submit.

STEP 7

At this point, you are getting your credit report. This page will show a summary of your report. Print out this page.

Next, look at the right side of the page, and click on the link “Print your report”. This will open a new page with your full printable report. Print out this full report.

Congratulations! You have obtained your credit report from one of the credit reporting agencies.



STEP 8

Study your report. Become familiar with it.

Pay attention to errors in the information.
In particular, if the report states that you have potentially negative credit information, make sure that the information is indeed correct.



STEP 9

For the assignment, write a brief report answering these questions:

1. Are there any errors in your report?
If there are, what type of errors are they? (e.g., wrong spelling of your name, wrong address, credit cards you do not own, etc.)

2. From studying your credit report, what did you learn that was surprising?
Write a paragraph or two or more describing what you learnt.


Be ready to talk about these and other issues in the laboratory session.

forgot?

is there no discussion today?

Group think and transactive memory

Groupthink is the idea that when people come together to collaborate, more people can only mean more chaos. In the context of gaming, if people are working together as a team playing a video game, the more people there are per team, the more difficult it is to work together efficiently. It's necessary as a team to collaborate on strategies and work together in order to win. With war games, working as a group is difficult because of the need for communication, and very often the game would be easier and more effective if the individual played alone on his side. Groupthink forces communication which can be cumbersome in the real time world of gaming.

Transactive memory on the other hand, is the idea that collaborating as a group is more beneficial than working alone because each person can offer information to the group. A person alone is limited to what he knows, but in a group, each member can contribute to the group to make up for an individual's lack of knowledge. This is particularly important in strategy type gaming. An individual can miss certain strategies, but when there are other group members involved, many more choices come up. Transactive memory uses the group as a strength, relying on each member's contribution of their knowledge.

Groupthink, transactive memory and gaming

Groupthink refers to the idea that group communication falls apart under pressure. This leads to irrational decision-making and impaired judgment. This concept especially occurs when people are alike, this is a problem since a decision will quickly be accepted by everyone and not thought through or an alternatives considered. In a groupthink-gaming situation, the group comes to a consensus on their gaming tactic, answers, and solutions. Unfortunately, in these settings, pressure is often the reason for rash and often times irrational decisions. However, the groupthink approach uses collaboration to come a decision in order to avoid an argumentation outbreak. For example when playing a group game, certain time guidelines are included in the rules. Answers need to be presented before this the time limit is reached and groupthink approaches coming to an answer by collaborating to come up with a resolution. Often times, however, analysis tactics, and testing is overlooked due to the possibility of conflict arising.

Transactive memory is when members of a group have different expertise and knowledge that they offer to the group when coming to a decision. This idea acknowledges group members as select individuals that can serve as external memory to help their team come to a resolution. Because every individual brings different information to the table, the group benefits from every member expertise. Of course, the group communication improves when every person is aware of one another's specialty. Consequently, in a gaming situation, with a little bit of knowledge collected from every individual, the group is able to piece together a solid answer, resolution, or solution to a problem to ensure a solid win. Because every member of the group recognizes that each member knows something that another doesn't, the group is open to strategies, suggestions, and sharing important information with other teammates during a gaming situation.

Group Think and Transactive Memory

Group think, in relation to surveillance, can be understood through a series of tests that were done involving a classroom. An experiment was set up to test the effect of group think. One hundred students in a geometry class were given a simple multiple choice problem to solve (i.e. evaluating the length of lines, determining which among a given set was longest).  Everyone in the class room was in on the experiment and told which line to choose, even though it was obviously not the longest line. Two students in the group were "ginny pigs" and were not told which line to choose. When asked as a whole group which line was the longest, 98 students raised their hands to answer incorrectly and as a result the 2 "ginny pigs" answered incorrectly due to group think. It was obvious the line chosen was not the longest, but this experiment shows the power of group think. It also shows the detrimental effect it can have on decision making when the answer is wrong and vice versa for a correct answer. 

Transactive memory involves group processing whereby people in the group are better able to recall information due the contributions of others. Individuals in a group are able to recall individual memory storage from a collective group of information. Much like open source software and computer gaming, everyone who can access the program can contribute to the betterment of the game or program. This may be seen as a downfall to some, as the information or final analysis is not based on one individuals observations but by the observations of many. Transactive memory serves many and is a community oriented process, and is a successful process, as the exercise in discussion last week proved, in gathering a pool of knowledge.  

Groupthink and transactive memory

Groupthink is a group dynamic that can develop in which consensus is encouraged and any sort of conflict is avoided. An obvious problem with groupthink is that decision making can have more to do with powerful personalities than convincing argument or well thought decision-making. People tend to take the path of least-resistance, and so an idea that might seem illogical or even dangerous to someone outside the group could appear perfectly rational in the context of the group's stifled discussion. When I was thinking about surveillance and groupthink, I was reminded of the book 1984. The groupthink that was so prevalent in that society was tied directly to the heavy surveillance that permeated society. This is a danger in our own society, as well, though hopefully not the extent of 1984. The government has admittedly been engaged in more surveillance in the last 7 years, and the concern with that is that it will discourage open discussion about things that might not be deemed "appropriate" in mainstream society.

Transactive memory refers to the types of grouping of memory that members of a group engage in. Different people in a group possess different areas of specialized knowledge, and people within groups can help other members remember facts by triggering memories with their own knowledge. This sort of system can be efficient, because it allows for a greater depth of knowledge in a group. More knowledge can be packed into a group. On the other hand, if transactive memory is going to be relied on, there needs to be familiarity with other members of the group, because otherwise, there could be huge and important holes in knowledge.

Groupthink and transactive memory
groupthink allows consensus to be reached through the path of least resistance: individuals only argue over issues where there is disagreement. people may give in to pressures from the rest of the group when there is conflict, which explains how it is possible for a group that possesses the right answer from one person, to get the wrong answer overall. Groupthink can't be greater than the sum of its parts: the group may get more answers correct than any one individual, but there are things that nobody in a group knows, so those issues won't ever get resolved. the web 2.0 solution is to get everyone involved: the more people who contribute, the more knowledge. in terms of fact-based or objective standards, this gets outcomes that are better and have more information. however, subjective things like 'which of these photos is best?' usually don't work well with groupthink. Flickr has a feature called 'explore' which selects the most interesting photos based on algorithms that point to which photos receive the most attention from the most users. what this tends to do is select photos that oftentimes have limited artistic merit but appeal to wide audiences: photos of kittens or scantily clad women. more serious photographers on flickr dislike 'explore' because it doesn't reward artistic merit, but rather mass appeal.

Transactive memory is a way by which an individual is able to remember things in a group setting that they could not have on their own. it's like when something jogs your memory: someone says a fact that you wouldn't remember off the top of your head, but it causes associations in your brain to kick in and cause you to remember things. it can also happen when someone says a statement like "all Xs are Ys". you might not have ordinarily remembered it as being true, but when mentioned, you might remember learning that all Xs are Ys.

Group think has its advantages and disadvantages. As demonstrated in class, working in a group allowed us to pool our knowledge together to come up with solutions faster and more effectively. In the professional context, groupthink has similar effects, getting the same job done in a more efficient manner. At the same time, individuals in a group are less likely to go against the grain in order to keep the group dynamic somewhat stable and conflict-free. Sometimes, conflict is necessary in order to produce positive change and this is less likely to occur in a situation where individuals must compromise and cooperate in order to get something accomplished. In the context of surveillance, individuals will usually submit to the groupthink mentality as a way to support the government's role in providing security and rooting out unnecessary conflict. However, it is necessary to question the implications of groupthink in this situation. Going back to the idea of the panopticon perspective, people who know they are being watched subconsciously behave differently in fear of doing something that might be interpreted as suspicious (this happens on the internet since people are aware of the surveillance that goes on; hence the reason for spyware).

Transactive memory works in a similar fashion since the focus is on the collective body, not the individual. This is why study groups are so effective, since students can pool together class notes and have access to more resources than if they were to study individually. This concept is inherent in gaming and seems to have fewer negative implications than the idea of group think.

As mentioned, the purpose of group think is to reach a consensus among the members without conflict. Therefore, the members don’t critic and evaluate others ideas so that arguments do not arise. Although this could lead to groups making decisions that are not necessarily the most thought out by all the individuals, it may present new ideas and information to a member who was completely unaware of it previously. Group think also leads to a spiral of silence where an individual might not give their suggestions or opinions because they feel they are in the minority.
This idea of groupthink applies to the games Digg and Urn. The rules for Urn are “There are two indistinguishable urns. Urn ‘W’ has two white balls, one yellow. Urn ‘Y’ has two yellow balls, one white. A proctor will flip a coin to choose an urn. You must guess which urn it is after seeing one ball from the urn AND AFTER HEARING ALL THE GUESSES OF THOSE BEFORE YOU. Your goal is to choose wisely.” People make decisions based off of the others responses and even may choose to ignore their own information. They may forgo the decision that they would have made if they had not heard the other responses. In this game the majority of people conform to what others do and say. Digg is basically an online version of Urn, where “measuring a story’s importance is based on a semi-random set of people voting for or against a semi-random set of news stories.” Information is given to the voters by following a web of links of blogs. After people see the other blogs they tend to follow what they have to say because they think the previous voters are rational in their decisions.

Transactive memory is based on expertise and how people tend to focus on areas they have more knowledge about and rely on other people in areas that they have more knowledge about. Andrea Hollingshead notes that “rather than trying to learn and remember all information relevant to their daily tasks themselves, members simply ask the designated expert on a need-to-know basis. Transactive memory develops naturally as a way to reduce individual cognitive effort and to provide group members with a larger pool of information.” Members must be familiar with the other’s strengths so that they can allocate certain areas to each member appropriately. In interactive games, this can be beneficial when a group member lacks the ability to do a certain task that another member is much better at. For example, any interactive online game that allows separate tasks to be done by different people each person will work on the area that they are most knowledgeable about without ever having to work on other areas. This way the group can win the game or strengthen the abilities of the characters more efficiently.

Online Gaming, Group Think, and Transactive Memory

Group think is a type of thought that develops from groups of people thinking and working together towards a resolution. The end result of group think is a consensus reached with as little conflict as possible. The fault with this type of thought is that for the sake of avoiding conflict, the group forsakes critical testing, proper analysis, and consideration of alternative options. Group pressure causes individual members to suppress dissenting opinions. Hence, the consensus reached is generally hasty and irrational, and does not maximize the knowledge of each individual in the group. In terms of online gaming, group think comes into play in strategy games like World of Warcraft where a group works together toward a common goal. Members feel compelled to go along with the group's plan though they might feel a different approach would work better or know something the other group members do not. Hence it can decrease a group's chance of success in the game and leave players feeling frustrated.

Transactive memory theory presents the idea that individuals can serve as external memory aids to each other. That is to say that information one could not recall working individually could be recalled if that person was working with a group of people. Since each person brings his or her own knowledge and expertise to the group, the group's collective knowledge increases. The goal with transactive memory is to enable the group to reach a higher level of performance than they could have without the contribution of the other group members. It relies on the members to have a good understanding of what each member knows and brings to the group. For online gaming, transactive memory can be very helpful. Each member can aid the group to be more successful by combining his or her own knowledge of the game with the knowledge of the other people in the group. Working together allows them to accomplish more and learn more because the responsibility and knowledge is spread out among the group. In order for transactive memory to be effective and not become group think, there must be a cooperative environment, familiarity between members of the group, and a non-hierarchical structure so that each member can contribute openly and honestly.

Group Think and Transactive Memory

Group think is a gathering of people who make decisions based on the amount of conflict that it will cause, meaning the "group" will do anything to avoid conflict. Thus, due to avoiding conflict many thoughts and ideas are not heard because people will think of themselves as foolish, or just "different" from the other within the group. An example of group think was the attacks on Pearl Harbor. These attacks could have been stopped, however the US chose not produce conflict and thus in the end had conflict brought towards them.

Transactive memory involves a group that uses each individuals memories in order to receive specific quantities of information. For example, when studying for a test a group relies on different individuals memories from class in order to complete the study guide and hopefully earn an "A" on the next exam.

Group Think and Transactive Memory

Group think is when a group thinks collectively while trying to minimize conflict. In order to do this people tend to shy away from sharing viewpoints that run outside of the group’s ideas and mindset. This can lead to many problems. It may lead to making decisions without careful consideration of outside problems. For example, a classic case of group think is the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. The people in the group ignored warnings and problems in order to reach their goal; resulting in ultimate disaster.
Transactive memory is a process in which people remember within groups. A person is able to rely on others memory for different pieces of information. This can be useful in games such as Memory. When played in a group against another group. If a person on the team is not able to recall then another group member may hold the other piece of information in order to complete the task.

Group think and surveillance, Transactive memory and online gaming

Group think is a decision making process characterized by the agreement on a solution reached by a group of individuals with the least amount of conflict possible. Often times in group think each individual does not need to postulate at his full capacity, or disclose all of his ideas to the entire group, as he relies on other group members to contribute and does not wish to express a minority opinion that may cause conflict within the group. Group think can be applied to the concept of surveillance, particularly a historical example. During the Cold War U.S. intelligence struggled to determine whether the USSR was harboring nuclear weapons both in their own nation and in Cuba, as they threatened they had. The presidential administrations at this time were very muched focused on the containment of communism; therefore many high profile officials and politicians would "go with the group" as they did not want people to think that they themselves were communist sympathizers. Therefore we flew spy planes, unauthorized, over the USSR and Cuba, and there was a huge scandal when the Soviets discovered our surveillance. This is one example in which group think may be ineffective, as it allows fear to drive a lot of decision making.

Transactive memory is also a group process, but each member only remembers a certain amount of important information pertaining to the problem, so the group all together can remember everything needed to solve the problem because each person brings his or her own knowledge to the table. This concept applies to online gaming in that each player brings a specialty or set of knowledge in playing the game. When players can communicate with one another via audio or text (like in World of Warcraft, Command and Conquer, etc.) they can share tips, strategies, troubleshoot, or even share cheat codes with one another to play the game more effectively. Each person does not have to be an expert player to receive expert player results because of transactive memory.