“A group may have more group information or less group information than its members. A group of non-social animals, temporarily assembled, contains very little group information, even though its members may possess much information as individuals. This is because very little that one member does is noticed by the others and is acted on by them in a way that goes further in the group. On the other hand, the human organism contains vastly more information, in all probability, than does any one of its cells. There is thus no necessary relation in either direction between the amount of racial or tribal or community information and the amount of information available to the individual.”

— Norbert Wiener, book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

VIII. Information, Language, and Society. p. 158.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A group may have more group information or less group information than its members. A group of non-social animals, temp…" by Norbert Wiener?

Norbert Wiener36

American mathematician 1894–1964

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Fifty years of information progress (1994), p. 7; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

“Any group or “collective,” large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“Any Organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal.”

Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968) American sociologist

Pitirim Sorokin (1927) Social Mobility, p. 12

“Organizations are systems of coordinated action among individuals and groups whose preferences, information, interests, or knowledge differ. Organization theories describe the delicate conversion of conflict into cooperation, the mobilization of resources, and the coordination of effort that facilitate the joint survival of an organization and its members.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Simon (1993. p. 2); Cited in Mario Catalani, ‎Giuseppe F. Clerico (1996) Decision making structures. p. 1.
1980s and later

“One may generalize upon these processes in terms of group equilibrium. The group may be said to be in equilibrium when the interactions of its members fall into the customary pattern through which group activities are and have been organized. The pattern of interactions may undergo certain modifications without upsetting the group equilibrium, but abrupt and drastic changes destroy the equilibrium.”

William Foote Whyte book Street Corner Society

p 263
Street Corner Society, 1943

“Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups. The aggregate relations among individuals and groups, among individuals within groups, and among groups forms a network of astonishing complexity.”

Clay Shirky (1964) American technology writer

Source: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008), p. 14

“Preferring members of any one group for no reason other than race or ethnic origin is discrimination for its own sake. This the Constitution forbids.”

Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (1907–1998) American judge

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978).
1970s

“Memory for playing a musical piece… involves a process very much like that for music listening… through establishing standard schemas and expectation. In addition, musicians use chunking… tying information together into groups, and remembering the group as a whole rather than individual pieces.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“Boys and girls don't pair off at birth and scurry off to a dank cave together. Humans have always been social animals. We live in cooperative groups. Our bodies sort us out into groups of males or females. We interact socially as members of one group or the other. These groups aren't arbitrary or cultural- they're basic and biological. Males have to negotiate male and female groups as males. Males aren't simply reacting to female groups as males. We react to other males, as males. Who we are has a lot to do with how we see ourselves in relationship to other males, as members of the male group.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Pg 1
The Way of Men (2012)

“Any text in spoken English is organized into what may be called 'information units'. (…) this is not determined (…) by constituent structure. Rather could it be said that the distribution of information specifies a distinct structure on a different plan. (…) Information structure is realized phonologically by 'tonality', the distribution of the text into tone groups.”

Michael Halliday (1925–2018) Australian linguist

Michael Halliday Notes on transitivity and theme in English: Part 2, 1967. p. 200 cited in: Klaus von Heusinger "Information Structure and the Partition of Sentence Meaning". In: Eva Hajičová (2002) Form, Meaning and Function. p. 287
1950s–1960s

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Norbert Wiener36

Related quotes

Related topics