Collective Induction

Collective induction is a task developed by Steiner and used in research on group problem solving.

[1] Broadly, the method entails "the cooperative search for descriptive, predictive, and explanatory generalizations, rules, and principles" [2] among members in a group working on the same task.

James Larson further defined collective induction tasks as "[tasks] in which problem solvers work cooperatively to induce a general rule or principle that can account parsimoniously for a given set of facts or observations" [3] This particular process has been used to determine if groups are better problem solvers than individuals.

This allows researchers to assess the potential gains or losses caused by group interaction while recognizing that more people working on a task may be more likely to arrive at the solution by random chance.

However, this does not address whether individuals working cooperatively can perform better than the best member of a similarly sized nominal group.

[6] As noted by Patrick Laughlin,[10] there are twelve postulates of collective induction tasks.

These rules are the result of years of research on collective induction tasks with groups and were originally published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.