Information Cascades and Independent Thought
In class, we discussed how Information cascades play a significant role in our decision making process. We say an information cascade has occurred when, “…people make decisions sequentially, with later people watching the actions of earlier people, and from these actions inferring something about what the earlier people know.” (Benson et Easley: 484) This is useful because it allows us to make rational decisions based on limited information. However, how do information cascades affect the formation of thoughts and opinions in education? What is the relationships between independent thinkers and the influence others have on them?3
According to the article, “Information Cascades in Professional Learning Communities”, the influence of others negatively impacts the process in which individual ideas are formed. “The fundamental problem with the information cascade is that after a certain point it becomes rational for people to stop paying attention to their own knowledge—their private information—and to start looking instead at the actions of others and imitate them.” The article argues that individuals hold the belief that the decision or thoughts that they come up with come intrinsically, or perhaps slightly influenced by others. But, in reality, they are dramatically, and in some cases, even determined, by the actions of others. The way this affects education and academia as a whole is that it discourages independent thought and encourages groupthink. The article even argues that this could lead to collective bad choices being made by groups as a result of this information cascade. “Instead of aggregation all the information individuals have, the way a market or a voting system does, the cascade becomes a sequence of uniformed choices, so that collectively the group ends up making a bad decision…”
In class we discussed two reasons pertaining to why people are influenced by others: information based reasons and direct benefit based reasons. Informations based reasons refer to extracting information based off the decisions others have made, and using that information to inform your choices. Direct benefit based reasons is getting a payoff as a result of imitating other arounds you, regardless if the behavior is fundamentally good or bad. In the case of independent thinking in education and information cascades, both reasons can be operating at the same time. Individuals may copy the behaviors of other high performing students so that they receive a payoff of high performance. Copying the behavior of “successful” students may be a direct benefit based reason. Furthermore, students may reproduce and imitate the thought processes of teachers because they assume that teachers are generally right. Presuming that teachers are always right and thus, imitating their thought process is an information based reason for why individuals will copy other behaviors.
Individuals in the education system can imitate the behavior of others due to presence and importance of information cascades. More specifically, information based reasons as well as direct benefit reasons push individuals to adopt the behaviors of those around them. This is not always a good thing because it has the potential to discourage independent thinking which, at the end of the day, should be a fundamental goal of education and academia.
Article: https://educationinnovation.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/07/information-cascades-in-professional-learning-communities.html