How do Co-agents Actively Regulate their Collective Behavior States?

Abstract

Collective capability of producing patterned collective behaviors is one important field of research in work psychology (e.g., shared cognition approach, Fiore and Salas, 2004; interactive team cognition approach, Cooke et al., 2013), neurosciences (e.g., social neuromarkers, Tognoli et al., in press; neurological mirroring, Waldman et al., 2015), sociology (Miller, 2013), or human movement science (e.g., joint movement, Schmidt and Richardson, 2008; team behavior, Araujo and Bourbousson, 2016). Within this stream of research, one neglected topic has been to conceptualize how interactors regulate online their dynamic involvement in collective activity, which is the individual skillful activity of adjusting online to the needs of the collective behavior. Grounded in of the hypothesis that collective behavior emerges from a self-organized complex system, the present opinion discusses the nature of the active regulation of the interactions performed by the co-agents. A deeper grasp of this regulation process is needed to understand how and why interpersonal co-ordination forms, stabilizes and/or is destroyed, leading to the emergence of high order phenomena at the team scale that are not fully predictable from the individual activities that compose the social system under study. Collective behavior is deemed here to constitute the property of a social system composed of living entities. In research that has considered collective behavior as emerging from a self-organized complex system, an important focus has been on the between-agents' interactions, supported by an informational flow that binds agents (e.g., Schmidt et al., 1990). In this stream of research, information is defined as an ambient energy that disturbs the agent, depending on his current activity (Varela et al., 1991). From the (interpersonal) informational flow, individual activities can be entrained, mutually affected by others' movements, so that the emerging collective behavior cannot be conceived out of either the nature or the content (i.e., being non-representational) of such a flow (e.g., Kelso, 1994; Lagarde and Kelso, 2006; Richardson et al., 2007). However, while between-agents informational flow has been considered the main binding mechanism that makes collective behavior emerge, we aim at pointing out that the way individuals manage their interaction in the real-time mainly has been theoretically presupposed rather than empirically investigated. We will use empirical and logical evidence to highlight shortcomings in the actual theorizations of the way individual movements merge into a collective unit. In our opinion, current research should restrict the importance of the co-regulation and the local couplings hypotheses. Both hypotheses appear unsatisfactory to us, and might probably be refined through a further consideration of the social system's size effects as a main topic.