Abstract :
Computational models of human intelligence almost always take the individual as the fundamental unit of analysis. But is this correct? For instance, if intelligence were primarily a group (or more generally, social network) phenomenon, then we would have to dramatically change how we approach the problem of computational intelligence. To explore this question, the author has built a `socioscope´ to track the behavior of groups of humans in great detail and during long periods of time, What he finds is that an amazing amount of human behavior can be accurately modeled by considering only certain sorts of mimicry, non-linguistic social signals, and stimulus-response mechanisms. That is, human intelligence is substantially, and perhaps even largely, a collective, network phenomenon
