ABSTRACT
Consider small groups of scientific researchers, weather forecasters, petroleum geologists, securities analysts, political prognosticators, market researchers, auditors, intelligence analysts, corporate board members, or air crash investigators. Although the objectives and task domains of these groups vary greatly, all of them engage in collective induction, the cooperative search for descriptive, predictive, and explanatory generalizations, rules, and principles. In the process of induction, all of these groups observe patterns, regularities, and relationships in some domain, propose hypotheses to account for them, and evaluate the hypotheses by observation or experiment. In the process of collective induction, all of these groups map a distribution of group member hypotheses into a single group response by some social combination process.
