This interdisciplinary research project will explain why different social group exhibits particular forms of organization by providing a rigorous way to determine the extent to which a social group's structure is shaped by external pressures, such as demands and opportunities afforded by the environment, rather than internal pressures, such as competition and misaligned incentives among group members. The project will constitute a new research thrust for the social and behavioral sciences regarding the ways that the structure of organizations constrains their ability to process environmental information, and it will provide new insights as to how organizations internally route information subject to restrictions on actors' capabilities. This project can help unite social and behavioral scientists ranging from those focusing on primate groups and forager societies to those studying the structure of multinational corporations. It will also provide tangible returns by suggesting how to best organize modern firms and governmental bureaucracies. The project will develop and make available databases on a variety of past and present social organizations which will be of broad scholarly value.
Social groups ranging from prehistoric societies to business firms to military organizations are organized in dramatically different ways, from egalitarian "horizontal" societies to deep "vertical" hierarchies and from sets of decentralized, modular teams to centralized command-and-control assemblies. Do social groups exhibit the organizations they do because these structures optimize information exchange, or are groups simply channeled by local historical precedent? This project will address this question by using recently developed mathematical techniques to formalize the notions of "collective problem solving" and "cognitive constraints." These formalizations will be employed to investigate which organizations perform best under different constraints and group sizes as well as which are most "robust" in continuing to function when members or inter-member connections are removed or the pressures on the group change. The investigators will then determine whether such optimal organizations reflect the way real groups are (or have been) organized. The problem of optimal internal organization has received attention in various fields, from anthropology to economics. However, there has not been a unifying mathematical framework for studying the relationship between different kinds of organizations and the pressures and constraints on organizations. This project will develop such a framework by combining techniques from graph theory and information theory. Graph theory studies the organization of social networks and provides a rich vocabulary for quantifying organizational properties like hierarchy, centralization, and modularity. Methods from information theory can quantify the bits of information processed or communicated between group members, conceptualizing a social group as a telecommunication network where network nodes correspond to group members and "bandwidth limits" on the network channels and nodes correspond to cognitive constraints. The researchers will identify network structures that best process information under different sets of bandwidth limits and compare the results to empirical data on past and present human organizations. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.
