ABSTRACT
If there are important group properties that are not necessarily selfevident, how are they to be identified? Pursuing our discussion of human groups on pages 289-290, we shall suggest three criteria. First, a group property is a characteristic that applies to the group as a single entity, and not to any single member. Thus it would make sense to say that a basketball team has the property of smooth intermember
coordination, or that the average height of its members is 76.27 inches, but no single member has the property of smooth intermember coordination, and average height is not a property of a single individual. These, of course, are totally different kinds of group properties. Each member contributes to average height simply as an individual, alone, whereas each contributes to team coordination only in relation to the others, by interacting with them.
