Tag: metacognition

Social Loafing: Getting Groups to Work Well Together

PsyBlog has an excellent summary of the research on social loafing, the phenomena where people working in a group work less compared to when they work alone. Because we do so much group work, this is sometimes an issue.

The first research on social loafing came from Max Ringelmann way back in 1913 (Ringelmann, 1913). He had people pulling on a rope, and compared the maximum they could have pulled, based on individual test, to how much each person actually pulled. The results were, kind of, sad; with eight people, each one only pulled half as much as their maximum potential strength. A graph of Ringelmann’s data is shown below. If everyone pulled at their maximum the line would have stayed horizontal at 1.

The relative loafing of people working in a group. As the group gets larger, the amount of work per person decreases from its maximum of 1. Data from Ringelmann (1913)

The PsyBlog article points out three reasons why people tend to loaf in groups:

  • We expect others to loaf so we do it, too.
  • We feel more anonymous the larger the group, so we feel less need to put in the effort.
  • We often don’t have a clear idea about how much we need to contribute, so we don’t put in as much as we could.

This can be summed up in Latane’s Social Theory:

If a person is the target of social forces, increasing the number of other persons diminishes the relative social pressure on each person.

— Latane et al., 1979: Many hands make light the work: The causes and consequences of social loafing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psycology. Quote via Keith Rolag’s Website.

How do we deal with this

The key is making sure students are motivated to do the work. We want self-motivated students, but creating the right environment, especially by training students in how to work in a group will help.

  • Make sure students realize the importance of their work; this makes them more motivated.
  • Build group cohesion; team members contribute more if they value the group they’re in.
  • Make sure the group clearly and fairly divides the work. Let everyone be part of the decision making process so students have choices in what to do will help them be more invested in their part of the work.
  • Make sure each group member feels accountable for their share of the work.

A Brief Excursion into Mathematics

Ringelmann’s data falls on a remarkably straight line, so I used Excel to plot a trendline. As my algebra students know, you only need two points to write the equation of a line, however, Excel uses linear regression to get the best-fit line through all the data. Not all the data points will be on the line (sometimes none of them will be on the line) but the sum of the distance from each point to the line is minimized.

Curiously, since the data is pretty close to a straight line, you can extend the line to the x-axis to find out how many people it would take for no-one to be exerting any force at all. Students should be able to determine the equation of the line on their own, but you can get Excel to give you the equation of the trendline. From the plot we see:

y = -0.0732 x + 1.0707

At the x-axis, y = 0, so;

0 = -0.0732 x + 1.0707

solving for x we first subtract the constant, 1.0707 from both sides to get:

0 – 1.0707 = -0.0732 x + 1.0707 – 1.0707

giving:

-1.0707 = -0.0732 x

then divide by -0.0732 to isolate x:

! \frac{-1.0707}{-0.0732} = \frac{-0.0732 x}{-0.0732}

which yields:

x = 14.63

This means that with 15 people, no-one will be pulling on the rope. In fact, according to this equation, they’ll actually start pushing on the rope.

It’s an amazing result, but if you can find flaws with my argument or math, please let me know.

Negative Feedback is Important

For success to occur, many things must go right: The person must be skilled, apply effort, and perhaps be a bit lucky. For failure to occur, the lack of any one of these components is sufficient. Because of this, even if people receive feedback that points to a lack of skill, they may attribute it to some other factor.
– Kruger and Dunning (1999): Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (pdf)

If we’re not skilled at something then only practice and learning can remedy the situation. But, according to Kruger and Dunning (1999), human nature tends to try to blame other things, like luck, instead of our own lack of skill when things go wrong. Interestingly, we’re even resistant to thinking that our lack of skill is the problem, even when we’re given that negative feedback.

So an essential skill for the student is to learn how to take criticism constructively. Self-awareness, metacognition, and the ability to be honest with oneself are important. Let this be a warning:

“One of the ways people gain insight into their own competence is by comparing themselves with others.” “Incompetent individuals fail to gain insight into their own incompetence by observing the behavior of other people.”
—Kruger and Dunning (1999)

P.S. Note that “incompetent” is used here to express a level of knowledge and skill that can be improved on to become “competent”. Incompetence is not a fixed quality, unless you let it be.

P.P.S. This is another reason why it’s important that students share their work with one another and the class. The best work tends to ratchet up the standards and expectations.

The scientific explanation of why adolescents know everything!

The central proposition in our argument is that incompetent individuals lack the metacognitive skills that enable them to tell how poorly they are performing, and as a result, they come to hold inflated views of their performance and ability…. the way to make incompetent individuals realize their own incompetence is to make them competent.
– Kruger and Dunning (1999): Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (pdf)

If you don’t know what you’re doing, then it’s quite likely that you don’t know that you don’t know. Kruger and Dunning (1999) did a set of interesting studies to show this to be the case. It explains why people with the least information and knowledge about a subject may feel the most confident to opine about it.

It kind of explains why adolescents know everything. I know that I knew everything when I was 12, and ever since then I’ve been knowing less and less.

Of course there are the less typical teenagers who don’t express the same unaware overconfidence. They can be extremely competent at a particular thing (let’s call it a domain), like writing to take a purely random example, yet are extremely unconfident of their ability.

Well Kruger and Dunning (1999) have an explanation for that too. Competent people tend to think everyone else is competent too, so they tend too underestimate their ability relative to everyone else.

Teachers can easily fall into a similar trap, because we will often, quite unintentionally and unconsciously, assume students know more than they do. This is one of the reasons peer-teaching works so well. Students are more likely to know where their peers are coming from, and what they know to begin with.

The NY Times’ Errol Morris has a great interview with one of this study’s authors.

I’ll end with the most wonderful concluding remarks, which really put this whole study in perspective:

In sum, we present this article as an exploration into why people tend to hold overly optimistic and miscalibrated views about themselves. We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Although we feel we have done a competent job in making a strong case for this analysis, studying it empirically, and drawing out relevant implications, our thesis leaves us with one haunting worry that we cannot vanquish. That worry is that this article may contain faulty logic, method- ological errors, or poor communication. Let us assure our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly.
—Kruger and Dunning (1999)

Abstract thinking and brain development

CT scan from the Visible Human Project.

Different parts of the brain mature at different rates. By early adolescence the parts of the brain responsible for social interaction are pretty well developed, but the parts responsible for critical thinking and impulse control (the frontal cortex) are not.

We visited the Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital today. And after a tour, a couple of people from the neurological division gave us a nice little presentation about the human brain. They used Rita Carter’s DVD, “The Human Brain“, which has a great animation of electrical signals pulsing from neuron to neuron through the neural network. I’m considering getting it for the class because the animations and the interactive slicing of the human brain are pretty neat. You can, however, find some, free applications for looking at the whole human body from the Visible Human Project.

Anyway, the fact that impulse control and critical thinking abilities are late to develop did not require fancy brain imaging to discover. Jean Paiget’s research on cognitive developmental stages found evidence that abstract thinking did not develop until the early teens. In fact, he found that abstract thinking (or formal operations as he called it) did not necessarily develop at all. As the frontal cortex matures, the ability to do abstract thinking also develops, but that does not necessarily mean that everyone learns how to do it. (At this point I make an unbiased pitch for the Montessori approach opposed to traditional schooling).

It’s very nice, or perhaps a better word is “elegant”, when very different types of research, using fundamentally different methods come to the same conclusions. In this case, neuroscience (brain imaging), which is ultimately based on physics and biology corroborates the psychological research into cognitive development, which is primarily based on observation and survey.

The importance of thinking about thinking

Know thyself - Socrates (and others) from Wikimedia Commons.

Personal World is the time for introspection. Every day students get a chance to think about themselves and, hopefully, about how they think. Thinking about your own thinking is called meta-cognition, and there is growing scientific evidence that it is an important life skill that leads to better decision making.

According to Jean Paiget’s theory of cognitive development students only begin to develop the capacity for abstract and meta-cognitive thinking in the middle school years. However, further research has shown that only about 30-35% of high schoolers actually develop the skill (it’s called “formal thinking” or “formal operations“). The brain develops the capacity for formal thinking in early adolescence, but people do not naturally move into that stage; school and the right environment are important.

For formal operations, it appears that maturation establishes the basis, but a special environment is required for most adolescents and adults to attain this stage. – Huitt, W., & Hummel, J. (2003)

The requirement that students spend some time in introspection is one key way that Montessori adolescent programs try to promote formal thinking.

Finally, Jonah Lehrer, a journalist who writes a lot about how people think and makes decisions, points out the importance of metacognition in the qualities that make for a good president.

some studies suggest that when confronted with a complex decision – and the decisions of the president are as complex as it gets – people often do best when they rely on their gut feelings …
However, it has also become clear that listening to your instincts is just a part of making good decisions. The crucial skill, scientists are now saying, is the ability to think about your own thinking, or metacognition, as it is known. Unless people vigilantly reflect on how they are making an important decision, they won’t be able to properly use their instincts, or know when their gut should be ignored. Indeed, according to this emerging new vision of decision-making, the best predictor of good judgment isn’t intuition or experience or intelligence. Rather, it’s the willingness to engage in introspection” – (Lehrer, 2008; emphasis mine)

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