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Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others
HughPickens.com writes 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 the 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."
Interestingly enough, a second study has now replicated the 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."
It's more than just empathy, it's knowing what other people know and how they think about things.
A classic example I remember from years ago was a salesman telling some people about a computer they were interested in. He told them it had 1GB of RAM and 250GB hard drive an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, without realizing that they had no idea what any of that meant. If he had understood that they didn't know that, and that they thought of RAM in terms of "it runs a few different apps and doesn't slow down" and the hard drive as "it can store a lot of photos and videos" he would have been following the Theory of Mind.
Engineers often do it as well. They explain things in the terms that they understand them, rather than in a way that accounts for the listener's knowledge and beliefs about how things are. In a group some people become ineffective and don't contribute anything meaningful because of gaps in their knowledge or because they have incorrect assumptions that others are not aware of, and no-one is a good enough communicator to recognize that and bring them up to speed.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
To quote from the report (c is a magic number they have calculated to indicate how successful groups were at collaborative tasks)
"c was positively and significantly correlated with the proportion of females in the group ( r =0.23, P =0.007)"
"there was as ignificant correlation between c and the average social sensitivity of group members, [...](r=0.26,P=0.002)"
What? Since when 0.23-26 correlation is 'significant' correlation? Just the fact that everything else they have measured had even lower effect doesn't make 0.25 a significant correlation.
But this is probably the effect of composition of research team. With 2 women and 3 men they had a significantly lower chances of producing something good... If they would only replace one of the men with a women, I'm sure results would be more forthcoming.
When there is a conflict, it's sometimes effective to first give someone with high estrogen a chance to understand both sides' viewpoints and work out a mutually agreeable solution. If that ddoesdoesn't work because the other side is being aggressive, it's often someone with more testerone who is best suited to put their foot down, to say "no, we're not doing that" and stay firm even if it hurts someone's feelings.
Once more, I'm speaking in terms of averages. There are also empathic men and coarse women. Vanzant could probably kick Chrisley's ass.
Then there are the Germans who refuse to take orders from female voices to the extent that GPS manufacturers have to make special male recordings for those markets. Was that a factor during WWII as well?
No, it was the other way around. When the British started doing "Funk spielen" mainly with German nightfighter controllers (breaking into the circuit and giving false or conflicting orders etc.) the Germans answered by using female intercept operators exclusively as there was no female British personell flying in combat. This promted the British to bring their own female operators along for the ride, aso.
Many other advantages are reported from having female ground control officers, for example easily being able to hear if the communication is from your fellow (male) pilots on that frequency or from ground control. (Yes, call signs are meant to do that, but voice differences that carry over radio give a more secure and faster way of determining the sender).
When it comes to automated voice messages in the cockpit I seem to remember USAF research in the F-16 time frame, that showed that female voices ("pull up") were preferable to male voices, due to better legibility and easier distinction against all the male pilot voices on the radio. The best effect was reportedly had by having a very young female (child) voice, think 8-9 year old, but that was never implemented due to the creapiness factor. But I can't find any reference to this research when Googling, and wikipedia says that new research points to this result being less stable today than what it was.
Stefan Axelsson