Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by LaminatorX on Monday January 19 2015, @03:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the ME-in-team dept.

Everyone who is part of an organization — a company, a nonprofit, a condo board — has experienced the pathologies that can occur when human beings try to work together in groups. Now the NYT reports on recent research on why some groups, like some people, are reliably smarter than others. In one study, researchers grouped 697 volunteer participants into teams of two to five members. Each team worked together to complete a series of short tasks, which were selected to represent the varied kinds of problems that groups are called upon to solve in the real world. One task involved logical analysis, another brainstorming; others emphasized coordination, planning and moral reasoning. Teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group’s success.

Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics (PDF). First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group. Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible. Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. It appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.

Interestingly enough, a second study has now replicated these findings for teams that worked together online communicating purely by typing messages into a browser . "Emotion-reading mattered just as much for the online teams whose members could not see one another as for the teams that worked face to face. What makes teams smart must be not just the ability to read facial expressions, but a more general ability, known as “Theory of Mind,” to consider and keep track of what other people feel, know and believe."

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Monday January 19 2015, @04:09AM

    by GungnirSniper (1671) on Monday January 19 2015, @04:09AM (#135947) Journal

    Women think about things, including tech things, differently from men. For example, when I wrote up a hierarchical solution database, how they wanted it organized was radically different from the men, but neither was objectively wrong.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Monday January 19 2015, @04:13PM

    by AnonTechie (2275) on Monday January 19 2015, @04:13PM (#136064) Journal

    [Related]: The Secret to Smart Groups Isn't Smart People—It's Women
    A fleet of MIT studies finds that women are much better at knowing what their colleagues are really thinking. It's another reason to expect the gender wage gap to eventually flip.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/01/the-secret-to-smart-groups-isnt-smart-people/384625/ [theatlantic.com]

    --
    Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
  • (Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Tuesday January 20 2015, @10:30AM

    by Magic Oddball (3847) on Tuesday January 20 2015, @10:30AM (#136294) Journal

    Except for the women like me that quite clearly think more "like a guy," and the guys that have traditionally thought much more like women supposedly do. It's hard to tell how common it is, since most learn to blend in as little kids (to varying degrees) by being taught how to interact, without even realizing as adults that what they'd been taught was influenced by their sex/gender.

    A big part of the evidence for this is that societies in different parts of the world have conflicting notions of what men & women are "naturally" like. If it was something that was an automatic sex-linked trait, then they'd be a whole lot closer to agreement.

    Regarding the group you worked with, there's several explanations, including a small sample size (we seem to be fairly rare), how much they match stereotypes otherwise, and whether you asked each person individually rather than discussing it as a group. It's one of those things that's hard to analyze without knowing a lot of details -- which is why leaping to the assumption that it's based on sex/gender isn't a great idea. :)

  • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday January 20 2015, @11:31AM

    by Wootery (2341) on Tuesday January 20 2015, @11:31AM (#136302)

    Women think about things, including tech things, differently from men.

    Probably, yes.

    For example, when I wrote up a hierarchical solution database, how they wanted it organized was radically different from the men, but neither was objectively wrong.

    At the risk of being 'that guy' ( should I use 'that person'? :p ): this anecdote tells us rather little.