Understanding Collective Cognitive Convergence

When a set of people interact frequently with one another, they often grow to think more and more along the same lines, a phenomenon we call "collective cognitive convergence" (C3). We discuss instances of C3 and why it is advantageous or disadvantageous; review previous work in sociology, computational social science, and evolutionary biology that sheds light on C3; define a computational model for the convergence process and quantitative metrics that can be used to study it; report on experiments with this model and metric; and suggest how the insights from this model can inspire techniques for managing C3.

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