The Individual as an hiformation Processing System 



323 



5.0 



4.0h 



OUTPUT 

 RATE 30 

 IN BITS 



PER 2.0 



SECOND 



I.Oh 



2 3 4 5 6 7 8 



INPUT RATE IN BITS PER SECOND 



Fig. 9. Average performance curves for teams in Social Institution Experiment. 



a movie projector. Each of three readers in the first room was 

 responsible for one-third of the total board. When a dot and its 

 number appeared in his sector, the appropriate reader wrote down 

 on a card the coordinates of the cell in which the dot appeared 

 and also the number of the dot. He then presented the caid to 

 his corresponding teller in the next room by passing it through a 

 slot. The teller in turn read the card by telephone to the cor- 

 responding plotter in the third room, who wrote the message 

 number in the proper cell on the plotting board. This board was 

 photographed automatically at 6-second intervals, so that a con- 

 tinuous record of the appearance of numbers on the plotting board 

 could be obtained. Thus, there were three entirely separate chan- 

 nels in this system, since Reader A always gave his information 

 only to Teller A, who passed the message only to Plotter A, and 

 so on for Team 2 and Team 3. The performance curves for these 

 teams had shapes similar to those curves obtained at the individual 

 and group levels when input in bits per second was plotted against 

 output in bits per second. Maximum channel capacity was about 

 four bits per second, approximately in the range of the group, 

 probably because information passed through about as many com- 

 ponents as in the group, rather than through more, as would 

 have been the case in a larger social institution (Fig. 9). These 

 subjects also had much more practice than those in our group 



