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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: 2) by threedigits on Monday January 26 2015, @03:59PM

    by threedigits (607) on Monday January 26 2015, @03:59PM (#138193)

    > two immediate examples are design and jury verdicts.

    Those were also the first two I thought, but guess what: they do not work.

    Design: this is basically a creative task. Group creation has been tried many times, and it always gives worse results than when there's just one person doing the design. The key is coherency. It's difficult to keep things coherent when many people have a say.

    Juries: Their main purpose is to serve as a representation of society. By choosing the ones that collaborate better you are biasing their verdict, so the jury becames useless for the intended purpose.

    And so on.

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  • (Score: 2) by Kell on Tuesday January 27 2015, @02:23AM

    by Kell (292) on Tuesday January 27 2015, @02:23AM (#138398)

    As a professor who teaches engineering design (in groups!), I respectfully disagree that design is not a group task. We train people specifically to do collaborate creative engineering tasks. I've also worked with industrial designers and graphic designers who work creatively quite well in groups.

    Juries collaborate to come to a consensus. Whether right or wrong, juries that can form consensus by listening to opinions and evaluating them collectively will perform "better" (for whatever value of better you may assign) than those that cannot work together.

    --
    Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.