Collective outcomes emerge from agent interactions and regularly contradict individual intentions.
Evidence
Social behavior, from persuasion and attitude change, to interpersonal relationships, to group interactions, results not only from the intrapsychic psychological processes of isolated individuals but also from interactions among multiple individual agents over time. In fact, in many cases, collective outcomes differ drastically from what any party expects or desires. For example, in studies of bystander intervention, because all participants assume that someone else is helping, the outcome is that no one helps. In the case of the commons dilemma and other social dilemmas, when self-interested individuals overuse a resource (grazing grounds, fisheries) or use a resource without paying for it (public television), the resource may be destroyed to the detriment of all. Despite the importance of these “emergent” effects among individual actors, explanations of such phenomena among social psychologists have focused almost exclusively on the processes that characterize how isolated individuals perceive, understand, and react to various stimuli. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 817
Categorization
- XREF: Links to the reader’s prejudice-psychology thread: collective prejudice outcomes (e.g. systemic exclusion nobody intends) fit the emergent-effects frame this passage introduces, parallel to how multilevel phenomena get missed when psychology studies only isolated perceivers.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 817