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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."

 
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @02:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @02:08PM (#136036)

    Organizations don't generally operate on things that are short term. It takes a while for animosity to accumulate, and people who've recently met are more likely to cut each other some slack. People are also more likely to cut slack if they have little invested, and when the total cost of failure is marginal. IOW, clinical studies are fundamentally flawed on this subject, because they are clinical.

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  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday January 20 2015, @12:38AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Tuesday January 20 2015, @12:38AM (#136197) Homepage

    I think this is important. Women are more likely to harbor hidden grudges, whereas men focus more on the problem or task at hand rather than try to undermine or play the social game, which might tip the scales on long term projects. (Yes I am sexist, I think women and men are different.) I do agree that being able to read the mood is important when working on a team, but I don't think that that automatically makes a team better (or smarter). Thus it may be that women > men on small tasks, but men > women on large projects.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @02:55PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @02:55PM (#136379)

      Categorizing based on sex is convenient, but inaccurate IMHO. It is more of a sociological truth, vs empirical truth thing. The most important thing to know, is whether you want to know, because knowledge is traumatic. It disassociates one from preconceptions, which is often a fearful experience. If one avoids that fear, then one is left with defining their life in relation to people (sociological truth), if one embraces that fear even at the expense of social ridicule, then one prefers empirical truth, and defines their life in relation to everything. The sexes tend to differentiate somewhat along these lines, but not universally.