Collective induction.

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Abstract
Tested whether a cooperative group could induce a general principle that none of the group members could have induced alone. 300 college students served as Ss. Individuals, 4-person groups, and 5-person groups attempted to induce a general rule that partitioned a deck of standard playing cards into exemplars and nonexemplars. Both 4-person and 5-person groups required fewer trials to solution than individuals, and both had a higher proportion of plausible hypotheses than individuals. A social combination analysis indicated that both 4- and 5-person groups were successful at recognizing and adopting correct inductions when inductions had been proposed by individual group members: If proposed by 1 member, correct inductions were recognized either on the trial on which they were proposed or on a subsequent trial; if proposed by 2 or more members, correct inductions were almost always recognized on the trial on which they were proposed. In contrast, collective induction in the strong sense of a correct group induction that none of the group members had proposed as an individual induction was rare. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

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