The Physics of Teams: Interdependence, Measurable Entropy, and Computational Emotion

Abstract

Most of the social sciences, including psychology, economics, and subjective social network theory, are modeled on the individual, leaving the field not only a-theoretical, but also inapplicable to a physics of hybrid teams, where hybrid refers to arbitrarily combining humans, machines, and robots into a team to perform a dedicated mission (e.g., military, business, entertainment) or to solve a targeted problem (e.g., with scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs). As a common social science practice, the ingredient at the heart of the social interaction, interdependence, is statistically removed prior to the replication of social experiments; but, as an analogy, statistically removing social interdependence to better study the individual is like statistically removing quantum effects as a complication to the study of the atom. Further, in applications of Shannon's information theory to teams, the effects of interdependence are minimized, but even there, interdependence is how classical information is transmitted. Consequently, numerous mistakes are made when applying non-interdependent models to policies, the law and regulations, impeding social welfare by failing to exploit the power of social interdependence. For example, adding redundancy to human teams is thought by subjective social network theorists to improve the efficiency of a network, easily contradicted by our finding that redundancy is strongly associated with corruption in non-free markets. Thus, built atop the individual, most of the social sciences, economics, and social network theory have little if anything to contribute to the engineering of hybrid teams. In defense of the social sciences, the mathematical physics of interdependence is elusive, non-intuitive and non-rational. However, by replacing determinism with bistable states, interdependence at the social level mirrors entanglement at the quantum level, suggesting the applicability of quantum tools for social science. We report how our quantum-like models capture some of the essential aspects of interdependence, a tool for the metrics of hybrid teams; as an example, we find additional support for our model of the solution to the open problem of team size. We also report on progress with the theory of computational emotion for hybrid teams, linking it qualitatively to the second law of thermodynamics. We conclude that the science of interdependence advances the science of hybrid teams.

The Interdependence of Autonomous Human-Machine Teams: The Entropy of Teams, But Not Individuals, Advances Science

“…Again, we assumed that the more redundant were the members, but now of a military team, the poorer the team would perform. With Kullback–Leibler divergence again, we obtained results that were significantly in agreement with our first study, reaffirming its findings [ 44 ]: that is, we found that the more freedom in a nation, the smaller the size of its military measured by its number of military personnel. In addition, we extended our research by hypothesizing and finding that redundancy was significantly associated with the level of corruption in a country, and that the interdependence in a nation’s teams was significantly associated with the individual freedom and the free-market scores of a nation.…”

“…Third, Kelley [ 96 ] found that, in the laboratory, the preferences determined by questionnaires for an individual when alone do not match what an individual choses in a social (game) situation, possibly the rational choice theory’s motivation to impute values based strictly on observations. For the prisoners dilemma game (PDG), no matter what Kelley tried in the laboratory for identifying the strongest preferences of individuals, interdependence transformed the actual choices that they made, impeding game theory from scaling to teams or larger collectives [ 8 , 44 ].…”

“…Individuals multi-task poorly [ 43 ]; e.g., using a cell-phone while driving a car. In contrast, multitasking is the function of teams [ 8 , 44 ], making teamwork an emergent property that is unequal to the sum of a team’s individual contributors. Forming and operating a team requires multiple streams of communications (verbal, non-verbal) that include the constructive and destructive interference transmitted by interdependence; e.g., destructive interference among humans includes angry debate, even among the best teams [ 45 ]; constructive interference includes support for the behaviors that are chosen for a context, for which AI systems, especially machine learning, have been unable to manage so far [ 46 ], a problem that must be solved for effective and efficient human-machine teams (see our Special Issue in AI Magazine; [ 1 ]).…”

“…What is the evolutionary advantage of having two tribes with different interpretations of reality? From Simon [ 50 ], if every story represents a bounded rationality, but if at least two sides exist to every story, then it takes at least two sides to determine social reality, which sets the stage for adversarial or competitive determinations of reality [ 8 , 44 ]. When neutral agents do not exist in an adversarial context, conflict becomes likely [ 51 ].…”

Hint of a Universal Law for the Financial Gains of Competitive Sport Teams. The Case of Tour de France Cycle Race

“…Let it be observed that cycling competition is a different matter: even though (it seems that) a cyclist race is won by only one individual, it is well known that this is a team activity [6,7,8] as usually recognized by the winner in interviews. The to-be-agent-based-model should use ideas based on cooperation beside competition [9,10,11,12,13], -a quite open and intense field of research in "new statistical physics".…”