Defining Group Agents

Image from http://www.zazzle.com/

While other projects have come up this fall, I thought I'd return to my ongoing challenge supporting the theory that western institutionalized education functions as an adaptive group.

My muse has been strong work in the science of religion by folks such as Atran, Norenzayan and Wilson.  My background in this project has been informed by generalized complexity theory (Prigione, Kauffman, etc.) and social network analysis (Cross & Parker, etc.).  The initial, formal, trajectory was via biology / evolution / multi-level selection theory (Wilson, Okasha, etc.).  Since summer, I've ben trying to rationalize/compare this initial trajectory with social science work, particularly Sawyer's excellent summary work.  I'm finally getting around to the economics perspective via List & Pettit's Group Agency work.

List & Pettit's book excels due to the purposeful transparency of their logical arguments.  Theory frame-work with a philosopher co-author!  They're coming at the group agent question from a joint intention path.  As can be seen below (List, Pettit, 2011), they take some remarkably different approaches from the biology crowd:

But while cultural evolution may plausibly shape existing group agents, just as competition shapes commercial corporations, we are not aware of any examples of new group agents coming into existence among human beings this way.  It is hard to see how individuals, each with his or her own beliefs and desires, could be organized without any joint intention, or continuing intervention, so as to sustain and enact group-level beliefs and desires distinct from their individual ones.

Their conditions for jointly intentioned groups (i.e. their "group-level") are:

• Shared goal 
• Individual contribution
• Interdependence
• Common awareness.

As an off-the-cuff exercise, let's see how institutionalized education stacks up...

Condition	Definition	Ed's Fit	Reason
Shared Goal	They each intend that they, the members of a more or less alien collection, together promote the given goal	4/5	Salient goals vacillate between social equality and academic actualization. (note: vocational education straddles my binary).
Individual contribution	They each intend to do their allowed part in a more or less salient plan for achieving that goal.	5/5	Teaching is based on extremely high intrinsic motivation. "Doing it for the kids" is a quasi-religious-like mantra
Interdependence	They each form these intentions at least partly because of believing that the others form such intentions too.	2/5 to 5/5	Lot's of uncertainty here.  The disdain of for-profit colleges and private k-12's is telling.  Most educators believe students come first. The degree to which socialization influences intentions vs. self-selection of intentions is uncertain.
Common awareness	Each believing that the first three conditions are met, each believing that others believe this, and so on.	5/5	Education is remarkably monolithic in purpose (increase abilities) despite huge differences in goals (equal abilities vs. actualized abilities) and paths (public-private, content knowledge-critical thinking, etc.)

Overall, I'd say education looks like it should fare pretty well in List and Pettit's group agent framework.  While I'm still working my way through the book, I'd say education's crux is liable to be the condition of idea rationalization.

The third front on which a group must organize itself...[is] that whatever beliefs and desires it comes to hold, say on the basis of its members' beliefs and desires, form a coherent whole. (pp. 37)

Now, I'm not too sure why List and Pettit took this road.  People seem quite good at non-rationalization of belief.  In fact the rise of Haidt's social-intuitionist model (and various others), seem  to suggest too much focus on rationalization is a red-herring.  And maybe it's my recent biological bias, but it seems like hard rationality is much harder to defend that an adaptive level of rationality.  But then, I guess it's easy to excuse a philosopher's rational bias when they make theory so clean....


References

List, C. & Pettit, P. (2011).  Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents. Oxford University Press

Economically poor, low performing schools

If institutionalized education functions as an adaptive group, one implication is that it should be fairly resistant to change.  Successful adaptive groups typically aren't swayed by potential freeloaders looking to do things that may only be good for themselves or a small sub-set of the population.  Now, this doesn't mean innovative behaviours aren't permitted, only that real, fundamental innovation relating to group function and moral mission is highly unlikely.

A corollary to this is that populations subject to lots of change, especially fundamental changes relating to moral mission, may be on the peripherally of the adaptive group or not part of it at all.

This leads to an interesting point: in the US, it seems like low performing schools in economically disadvantaged areas undergo significant reform efforts.  In practice this often means hopping from one reform flavour to another, often very quickly.  In many schools, such reform practices are mitigated and hybridized.  It seems to me that in these poor school forces exasperate rather than mitigate reform pressure.

Is it therefore reasonable to conclude that such schools and such students are on the periphery of education's adaptive group?  If so, will it take a major phase change back to a state more intolerant of reform experimentation to bring this population back into the adaptive group fold?

In other words, while reform efforts are intended to help out disadvantaged populations, on an evolutionary, do they do the opposite by risking population exclusion from the adaptive group?

One of the cruxes of this idea is whether the changes in poor schools are fundamental to education's moral mission or are merely superficial tactical changes.  I don't know.

Application Test

Over the summer my education reform resistance ground-work seems to have settled down.  At least to me, its seems seems to have come together as a larger framework that I was expecting.  In fact, it is probably best articulated as a full fledged theory: Education as an adaptive group. While there is lots more work to get it constructed as a theory, perhaps it's time to test what utility the dynamical model associated with this idea has….

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recently posted a regression of innovation in education system innovation vs. 8th grade math teacher satisfaction.  The results show a moderately strong positive correlation.  A conclusion is that teachers are more satisfied when education systems innovate more.

SITUATING THE TEST CASE

This research fits with Bogler's (2001) finding that teacher prefer to work with a leader that exhibits transformational behaviour rather than transactional behaviour.  It also fits in with miscellaneous research on human preference for novelty, which certainly seems to be an evolutionary selected trait.  Of interest to me, the OECD finding also fits, tangentially, with Sigmund's & Nowak's (2001) simulation which shows minor preference for tolerance among individuals leads to increasing levels of tolerance leading to cyclical transitions to extreme intolerance.  Of course, to apply Sigmund's work you have to make a rather large leap in assuming increased tolerance also means increased novelty/innovation.  Such a leap is fine for armchair bloggers, but certainly isn't academically sound.  Nonetheless, it seems like the OECD finding is well supported by what I know (but haven't cited) of evolutionary cognitive science research, educational leadership research and teacher preference research.

RE-CAPPING BIG IDEAS

Education as an adaptive group theory (or the current nascent underpinnings of this potential theory) suggests the institution of education, and those who are considered members of this group, are dynamically torn due to competition of between-group (group) selection and its proximate causes and within-group (individual) selection and its proximate causes.  Weak dominance of one factor over another creates instability (Okasha, 2009) while strong dominance creates stasis.

An adaptive group, such as institutionalized education in rule of law states, is subject to moralization selection. This includes things associated with freeloader detection, norm variation punishment, and transcendental moralization (Atran, 2002; Wilson 2002; Norenzayan 2013; Haidt 2013).  Institutionalized education is a moderate moralized group.

A functionalist interpretation of the education-as-an-adaptive group model postulates a variety of different attractor descriptions for the group end state and for the individual end state.  Each pair of descriptors should be complimentary (i.e. tolerance & intolerance would pair as a dyad, but curiosity & power would not).  Education functions, amongst other things, as a societal coherer that provides significant fitness benefits for its constituents.

A non-functionalist interpretation of the education-as-an-adaptive group model postulates tension between group processes and individual processes.

In both the functionalist and non-functionalist interpretation, group processes/states dominate weakly.  Continued group expansion or maintenance of large group stature leads to increased heterogeneity. This can be envisioned a the rise of individual processes (non-functionalist interpretation) or attraction to the individual state (functionalist interpretation).  This eventually challenges adaptive group function.  A phase change occurs to a homogeneous state/process (adaptive group state).  The cycle repeats.

Education's competitive relationships are fairly stable in scope: its sphere of influence is not rapidly changing.  Group competitors may include such things as homeschooling, private tutor based education, non-institutionalized religious education, religion, some radical outcome-based charter schools, and perhaps political groups.  K-12 competitors differ from post-secondary competitors.

VALIDATIONS

Relevant to the OECD report correlating increased innovation with increased teacher satisfaction, education as an adaptive group theory accurately predicts findings.

1. Teacher preference for innovation - Homogeneity of the group state is unstable.  Individual process &/or sub-group splintering rises complexly.  Processes that facilitate individualization should be favoured.  Education's moderate moralizing characteristic minimizes the degree to which it favours extreme conservatism.  Education has just the right degree of freedom to facilitate innovation but prevent group implosion.
2. Education is near or slightly above the average innovation levels of other professional sectors - Institutionalized education has functioned as an adaptive group for 150 years (since the emergence of popular public education).  Education's moderate moralizing characteristic minimizes the degree to which it favours extreme conservatism or extreme progressivism.  Education has just the right degree of freedom to facilitate innovation but prevent group implosion.  

PREDICTIONS

Here are a few predictors I came up with which can't be verified from the data.

1. 50 year period for innovation preferences - Education as an adaptive group model predicts that teacher preferences for innovation should wax and wane with a major period of 50 years.  Every 50 years one should see a spike in in-tolerance toward divergent practice.  A correlated decrease in innovation preference is likely.
2. Minor (complex) cycling - Within each country, one should expect to see minor cycling between high and low levels of innovation preference.  Tension between group state and individual state produce complex dynamics.  Greater dominance of group processes or individual processes should produce more stable dynamics.
3. High moralization facilitates divergence or extreme conservancy - As the severity of education's moralizing character increases one may tend to expect either a shift to extreme conservancy (i.e. religious like behaviour), or the ability to function with increased levels of divergence (i.e. the moral mission is strong enough to unite disparate individuals).  
4. No moralization leads to unsustainability - As eduction's moralizing character vanishes one may expect to see education not function as an adaptive group (i.e. degrees and accreditation may have little value). One may also see unsustainable institutionalized operation at the group level (i.e. lots of total reforms & co-optation of purpose).

CONCLUSION

The main finding of the OECD piece, preference for innovation, seem to weakly validate education as an adaptive group theory.  However, there is a fair bit of 'handwaving' involved.  Functionalistic argumentation is very weak. While I've been trying to stay out of the functionalistic trap, it seems likely I'll get caught in it in order to explain why the group operates with a background bias for toleration/innovation.

Sigmund's work shows a slight preference for toleration leads to the cyclical dynamics observed in education.  Wilson's (and others) recent work on altruism will likely provide some ammunition supporting minor preference for inclusivity/tolerance.  However, more work is obviously needed to show that education doesn't function in a highly competitive environment, and thus doesn't require tight norm detection and punishment.  I suspect some of the work on the emergence of universalizing religion would be quite informative here.  For example, Beneke's book on the origins of American pluralism is likely to be quite good.

Additional work on education's role as a large group is needed.  For example, does a large group role require universalizing tendencies such as slight preference for innovation, divergence and tolerance?  Again, this seems to be a likely draw into functionalism.

REFERENCES

• Atran, S.  (2002).  In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion.  Oxford Press.
• Bogler, R.  (2001).  The influence of leadership style on teacher job satisfaction.  Educational Administration Quarterly, 37, 662-683.
• Haidt, J.  (2013).  The Righteous Mind:  Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.  Vintage.
• Leach, C., Zebel, s., Vliek, L, Pennekamp, S., Doosje, B., Zomeren, M. Ouwerkerk, J., Spears, R. (2008).  Group-Level Self-Definition and Self-Investment: A Hierarchical (Mulitcomponent) Model of In-Group Identification.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,  95 (1), 144-165.
• Norenzayan, A.  (2013).  Big Gods.  How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict.  Princeton University Press.
• OECD (2014).  Measuring Innovation in Education: A New Perspective, Educational Research and Innovation, OECD Publishing.  Retrieved August 20, 2014 from here.
• Okasha, S. (2009).  Evolution and the Levels of Selection.  Oxford.
• Sigmund, K., Nowak, M. (2001).  Tides of Tolerance.  Nature, 414, 403.
• Wilson, D. (2002).  Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society. University of Chicago. 

Rule of Law or Education facilitated coherence

In his exceptional book "Big Gods", Norenzayan not only explains the causal arrow between the evolution of religion and the evolution of society/civilization, he also correlates rise in the rule of law with decrease in the practice of religion.  As he suggests, an effective rule of law is likely to fulfill many adaptive function of religion.  This includes:

• norm enforcement which maintains group (national) coherence
• guaranteed norm enforcement ('freeloader') punishment
• commonly understood norms
• a potential moral 'Big Brother' (for those whose existential views require one)

While this makes sense to me, some points are weaker than others.  For instance, would a permeant welfare recipient be considered a freeloader? They get individual benefit without always putting much into the group, and they aren't criminalized like those who directly take things from others.  Or would they fall into the same category as little children or the aged: part of the group despite minimal immediate group contributions?

Norenzayan's inferred intent is to suggest that rule of law acts as a norm creator & enforcer.  This frees people up from relying on religion to create and enforce norms necessary for societal stability/emergence.  

When I look back at history it appears that at some point hard and soft norms were distinguished: civil society tended to take over clear cut negative norms (you killed, you stole, etc) and religion tended to take over fuzzy negative norms (you weren't nice, etc.) and positive norms (be nice, virtuous, etc). Religion kept the moral 'Big Brother'.  However, in the last few decades people in many rule of law states either no longer require religion's moral Big Brother or no longer require religion.  Here are some possible reasons off the top of my head.

1. Trust in the rule of law's longevity has become strong enough to obviate the need for a moral 'Big Brother'
2. A sufficiently strong moral Big Brother has emerged (at the individual level) in other institutions or social groups.  i.e. the Democrat party is my moral Big Brother.
3. Moral Big Brother's role has diffused (for individuals) between multiple institutions and social groups. i.e. I get some morals from my online minecraft group, some morals from my friends, and some from my political party, etc.

The evolutionary need for a Moral Big brother hasn't been established.  While it is certainly critical in religion and quasi-religion formation/sustenance, this doesn't mean it is an evolutionary proximate cause, nor an evolutionary tendency.  It certainly may be, but research has yet to reach this question.  (My suspicion is that given a normal distribution of people, we'd expect some to fall in case 1, some in case 2 and most in case 3.  However, I wouldn't be surprised if case 2 ended up as the mode rather than case 3).

My study of education as an adaptive moralized (sometimes even transcendental) group mean, at least for me, cases 2 and 3 are the most interesting.  In this vein, I wonder if the 'r' between atheism and education as a reform resistant institution would be similar to Norenzayan's 'r' between atheism and the rule of law? If so, Norenzayan's expectation of causation may be unfounded: education's role as a societal coherer, which manifests itself through adaptive level group characteristics such as reform resistance, may be what enables societal stability without religion.  If this is the case then a moral Big Brother may take second seat to institutionalized coherence creation.... Or it may not….

Does homeschooling inform accurate education reform modelling?

The other week I tried to do some armchair speculating about which standard science based evolution of religion model would best fit education.  Besides having some idle fun, the goal was to investigate feasibility of an approach to analyzing the physics giving rise to education's (moralistic and ideologically influenced) reform resistant dynamics.

Recap

Last week I used blended learning as a foil for analysis.  This armchair analysis suggested that, in post-secondary contexts, education fit a performance modelled religion (or quasi-religious like group) better than a commitment modelled religion (or quasi-religious like group); A sharing of common experience seems to matter more than whether students avoid "taking the easy road out" through perceptionally easier online alternatives.

Extending this method of analysis into K-12 is problematic (for broad-based methodologies). In K-12 contexts, blended learning courses and programs tend to be extremely hybridized (see Cuban's 2013 discussion on Ed's tendency for hybridization & his blog).  Few K-12 schools clearly fence off the delivery of online courses.  Those that do, tend to either be fully online schools, or engage in much more hybridization than they are likely to admit.  The Christensen's institute's Rise of K-12 Blended Learning report (and database) and the Blend My Learning database provide lots of extremely useful information about the blended models K-12 schools employ.  Schools which offer true blended programming (fully online courses which are distinct from face-to-face or blended courses) certainly could be used to analyze the religious models best fitting education.  However, homeschooling offers another potential foil for analysis.

Ways Homeschooling Can Function as an Investigative Foil

Mixed Programming

The first way homeschooling can act as investigative foil is with regards to mixed programming between a traditional school and the family.

A small, but growing percentage of homeschooling programs (particularly fully funded, curricularly based "distance learning" programs) have agreements with parent school districts and local schools that enable "homeschool" students to take one or more face-to-face courses at their local traditional brick and mortar school.  At least in my neck of the woods, bureaucratic rules preclude this for non-curricular based homeschool programs.

A comparison of teacher and community perceptions of mixed homeschooling and pure homeschooling  has the potential to tease out distinctions between commitment model fit and performance model fit.  This could be done using methodology similar to that outlined in the blended learning analysis.  Basically, ask people what they think about homeschoolers who take all, most, some or none of their courses in a traditional school.  Measure perceived levels of acceptability versus percentage of courses done in a traditional way.

Mixed Programming Conclusion

My (unfounded) suspicion, based on a handful of experience with such cases, is that one would see a partial linear relation emerge for mixed homeschooling programs.  I also suspect a single traditional school course would make a huge difference in "acceptability" (see left graph).

This is almost what I theorized might happen in post-secondary.  In post-secondary I theorized, after one face-to-face course, there would be little difference in perceived acceptability. In other words, either things would be much less linear during the transition phase or the slope would be much less significant (see images to the left).

This may suggest K-12 schooling may have more influence from a commitment model and its hypothesized (though certainly not verified) linear effects. However, this is a pretty big "may" (in fact a pretty big double "may").

Commitment models of religion need not be any more or less linear than a performance model of religion.  Both are likely subject to phase change once a minimum input threshold has been met.  Unfortunately, I haven't seen any research on curve types.  Hence the utter speculation currently involved in such (testable) inquiries.

One thing to note from these curves is that near total acceptability in K-12 is likely only to come when all courses are completed in a traditional format.  In post-secondary, I doubt very much whether anyone cares if you took some of your electives or even core courses in an online format.  That is very much not the case with homeschooling.

Experience suggests rejection of traditional school based power structures elicit nasty community judgments.  Homeschooling stigma seems to hold whether or not families reject just the structure of schooling or the structure and curriculum.  I'd also note that this stigma seems to vanish dramatically when homeschool parents acknowledge the prime positional role of traditional schooling.  From my experience in this field, parents suffer minimal stigmatization when they indicate to the community that their reasons for homeschooling are to provide specific special needs attention not available or feasible within traditional schools.  This (untested) trend seems fits the power dynamics one expects to see with moralistic based groups (ie. religion, rule of law, strong moral ideologies, etc.).

Straight-Up Rejection Perceptions

The other way to use homeschooling as a foil for the specific science of religion model fitting education is via direct survey-styled questions.

Create a couple of different case studies that highlight various levels of homeschoolers' rejection of 1) commitment to education, 2) intent to share common (educational) experiences, 3) governmental (curricular) power.  Stitka's (2005) work suggests measuring moral convictions is possible.  A nice paper by Ryan suggests this instrument has been repeated enough to be reasonably valid.  I tend to be a bit doubtful that direct questions of moral convictions could yield the information necessary to assess the religious evolutionary model which best fits education.  However, I could be wrong.

Conclusion

Armchair theorizing exploring the physics associated with education's reform resistance suggests education can be interpreted through the lens of quasi-relgious dynamics.  Both blended learning and homeschooling are foils that can be used to analyze the potentially non-rational heuristics people use when judging the acceptability of others' non-traditional schooling choices.  My biased armchair analysis suggest non-linear effects may be revealed.  Non-linearity raises doubts about ration-choice decision model accuracy in educational reform contexts.

My personal familiarity with perceptions of homeschooling suggests perceived commitment levels are more of a factor in k-12 education than shared experiences.  However, the science of religion field doesn't have data about the linearity or non-linearity (curve type) of each model as a function of participant degree.  While one can assume commitment is a more linear function than performance, this is a big assumption.

Power dynamics don't fully delineate religious model fit.  Homeschooling's rejection of traditional education could either be a rejection of the power of educational ceremony (common experience) or a rejection of education's commitment power (give in to the 'borg').  My experience and my interpretation of homeschool literature (Olsen, 2008, Green & Hoever-Dempsey, 2007) suggest most homeschoolers reject education's norming (borg) role. A possible caveat is that education's norming role could be loosely interpreted as a 'norming' ceremony.  However, this really stretches the 'one-time' connotations associated with ceremony.

Therefore my conclusion is that a commitment religious model is the best fit for k-12 education while, from last week, a performance religious model is the best fit for post-secondary education.

Notes

It is interesting to see that homeschooling stigma levels are significantly greater than distance learning stigma levels despite similar degree of exclusion from the brick and mortar school houses.  It is certainly tempting to interpret this difference in terms of power dynamic.  It is also tempting to further interpret these power dynamics in terms of proximate (group) causes from multi-level theory.  And to me at least, it is hard not to contextualize the multi-level proximate causes in terms of quasi-sacred or lightly transcendental quasi-religious-like dynamics. 

References

Cuban, L. (2013).  Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice:  Change Without Reform in American Education:  Harvard Educational Publishing Group

Cuban, L., Tyack. (1995).  Tinkering Toward Utopia: Harvard University Press.

Green, C., Hoover-Dempsey. (2007)  Why do Parents Homeschool?  A Systematic Examination of Parental Involvement.  Education and Urban Society, 264-285, 39 (264).

Olsen, N. (2008).  Understanding Parental Motivation to Home School: A Qualitative Case Study.  Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Missoula, Missoula Montana.

Ryan, T. (2013).  No Compromise: Political Consequences of Moralized Attitudes.  Paper presented at the 2013 American Political Science Association Meeting.  Chicago, Illinois.

Skitka, L. J., Bauman, C. W., & Sargis, E. G. (2005). Moral conviction: Another contributor to attitude strength or something more? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 895–917.