Intelligence: The Interdependence of Independent Members of Teams

Abstract

With ad hoc models of individuals that often fail to replicate, social science has been unable to generalize theory into physics models of social reality that benefit the new field of robotic teams. For example, Shannon’s information theory and the social sciences, including economics, assume that the individual observation of individual behavior records the true perceptions of the actual behaviors that have occurred, including for the self-reports of self-observed behavior. In computational social science, this phenomenon has been informally labeled as the “god’s eye view”, indicating that the “computer” within which computational thoughts and actions occur knows immediately whatever thought or action a computational agent holds or takes. In the social sciences this phenomenon allows social scientists to assume that self-reported behavior is actual behavior (e.g., but if true, deception would not exist), justifying the replacement of models of physical behavior with cognitive models. We claim that this assumption is unsupported by the evidence, including the laboratory finding agreeing with religious beliefs that cooperation provides for the best social good. At the heart of these rational, but false, models, interdependence is seen as a constraint (information theory) or experimental confound (cognitive models) that must be overcome to confirm a-theoretical models based on methodological individualism (MI). By replacing MI with quantum-like models, we have found that only a competition among teams establishes social reality; that the sum of non-affiliated individuals, as neutrals, determines the team that best captures reality; and that best performing teams maximize their search of the environment for solutions to the problems they were designed to solve, while the poorer performers search for better mates (e.g., business mergers) or seek to jettison weaker mates (e.g., business spinoffs). We extend these findings with relative entropy to show that poorly performing teams are improperly fitted. We conclude that, like entanglement at the atomic level, interdependence at the social level is the primary resource that ordinary humans exploit to innovate and promote social welfare.