The Group-Member Mind Trade-Off

What it is

Waytz and Young asked whether people see groups as having minds of their own, able to think, intend and plan, and how that attribution affects both the group and its members. The paper appeared in Psychological Science in 2012 under the title The group-member mind trade-off: Attributing mind to groups versus group members.

The central result is a trade-off. Across their studies, the more people attributed a group mind to a group, the less they attributed individual minds to its members. The paper also reports that groups seen as having a stronger collective mind were viewed as more cohesive.

The finding belongs next to entitativity, the degree to which a set of people is perceived as one coherent unit. A group that seems to act with a single mind is, in ordinary terms, a group that seems like a unit. The two ideas are neighbours; the abstract used here does not state that the studies measured entitativity itself, so this page treats them as related rather than identical.

In effect

The trade-off describes how a perceiver's description shifts. Describing a team as one actor, which decides and intends, goes with crediting less individual mental life to its members. Describing the same team as a roster of people goes with the opposite. The effect is on how mind is attributed in judgement, not on what the members actually think or do.

Alongside it, Matthew Crawford, Steven Sherman and David Hamilton reported in 2002 that perceiving a group as high in entitativity carried traits inferred about one member over to the others. Both findings concern what changes in the perceiver once a set of people is taken as a unit.

What it does not say

The trade-off is a finding about attribution, about how mind is credited by observers. It does not say that groups have minds, or that members lose anything by belonging to a group. This page draws on the paper's abstract and journal record, so it does not report the number of studies, the samples or the effect sizes.

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