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Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others

Posted by timothy on from the so-more-emoticons-then? dept.

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."

9 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. The white in your eyes by Roodvlees · · Score: 1, Interesting

    are thought to be there specifically so others are able to see who you are communicating with. Improving cooperation between people.

    --
    Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
    1. Re:The white in your eyes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I am autistic and it is true I can't work in a team, at least not with neurotypical people who can't communicate properly and who rely far too much on emotions instead of simply talking. Each time I tried, I always felt extremely frustrated with the others and the others felt extremely frustrated with me.

      Right now I'm a computer consultant. The major problem I face is when I must meet clients. Even in a technical meeting, people are in constant need of socialization. If they don't have this need satisfied, they simply can't work. So in a meeting, I can't think because I must use all of my mind to provide this socialization to others.

      My solution is to communicate mostly with emails and telecommute. Of course I can't work for long for the same client, because after a while that client feels frustrated I don't want to meet more often with him. I now live in Quebec, which means I speak French, and the simple fact that I always say "vous" and can't say "tu" to a client frustrate them after a while.

      Having said that, when the team is clearly hierarchical and tasks are clearly divided, I outperform about everyone.

      An example of that was my two years of military service (as a conscript). I was promoted corporal in 6 months, then master corporal 6 months after and sergeant after another 6 months (in my regiment, there was only two places for sergeant conscripts and I was one of those two).

      Because of my military experience, I do think autistic people can work very well in a team. The problem is our world is not a technocracy nor a meritocracy like in the military, but a "socialocracy". It is ruled and shaped by people who have the best social skill, not by people who have the best technical skills. And of course, "hypersocial" people want a world where their social skills is the most important. So anyone who doesn't play their game, using the rules which give them an advantage, is someone they don't want to work with.

    2. Re:The white in your eyes by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Doesn't this study show that women and men don't work as well together as they do separately, and that trying to increase diversity results in less effective teams, and was a bad idea all along?

      No. What it says is that team performance increases as the number of women increase. So teams of all men do worst, teams with some women do better, and teams with all women do best. I doubt if this is actually true, but that is what the study says.

      We see few Nobel prizes going to teams of women researchers, few successful corporations with all female executives, and few political systems run by women. If women are so much better at teamwork, why don't we see more successful teams of women? Why isn't there a private equity firm that specializes in acquiring companies, firing all the male executives, replacing them with women, and then cashing in as the profits soar? The results of this study don't mesh with reality.

    3. Re:The white in your eyes by myowntrueself · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You don't have to be autistic to find oversocialisation in work meetings to be a problem. Where I work easily half our team meetings are taken up with jokes and banter. Its ridiculous because we actually have work to discuss and work to do after the meetings.

      If only people would stop cracking jokes things would be so much better for me. We are there, at the work place, to do a job. That job is not being comedians, its being engineers.

      And I am very proudly neurotypical.

      --
      In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
  2. could be fems average better at groups, men one by by raymorris · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It could very well be that females average better during the group portion of tasks, the part that requires a lot of communication and empathy; then when everyone goes back to their desks men average better at _____. I know in my own life women tend to be more interested in having in-depth conversations and understanding each other, on average. Mean tend to be more interested in gadgets and how they work. Again, I'm speaking of averages - individuals vary considerably.

    Physically, men tend to do better at tasks involving short bursts of strength like dead lifting, while women tend to have more stamina. It's not unlikely that females mind tend to be better at understanding another person's point of view, while men might be better at disregarding the feelings of a bill collector and hanging up on them or interrupting, not allowing the collector to go off an tangents not appropriate to the issue at hand. That seems to be true from my experience - women generally aren't as comfortable being "rude" . When there is a conflict, it's sometimes effective to first give someone with high estrogen a chance to understand bo

  3. Theory by kria · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There are studies that show that women are less likely to speak up when outnumbered by men. So if the most successful teams were ones where everyone contributed equally, it seems like those groups would tend to either have more women so that women are more willing to speak up, or no women at all (assuming that men are all likely to contribute in that environment).

    http://www.salon.com/2012/09/2...
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01...

  4. Communication skills by rwa2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Doesn't the USAF have a study somewhere that women are better at communicating data, period?

    They would use female radio operators since they found it easier to understand female voices over lossy radio channels. Maybe something to do with the higher pitched voices, or better use of intonation in language, or maybe something empathic or psychological that we don't understand but the effect was there.

    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?

    On the flip side, was it the USAF or NASA that was investigating the long term social groups for extended space missions, and found that grous of all-men could get along, but introduce one female and they start fighting for her attentions? But that was still better than an all-female crew, who would eventually but almost always turn on each other after too much time working together?

    1. Re:Communication skills by OrigamiMarie · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I think I've heard two other reasons for picking female voices over male voices in cockpit instruction recordings. 1. Airplane noises tend to be low pitch and thus lower male voices get drowned out a lot more easily. 2. An authoritative sounding woman's voice is closer to mom's voice, and most people are trained from an early age that when mom sounds like that, you do what she says (even if you're uncertain, freaked out, or disagree but don't have better plans at the moment).

  5. Re:Really? Theory of Mind by nine-times · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think "empathy" is generally characterized more by feelings. You see someone who looks upset, and you find it upsetting. I think this "Theory of Mind" business is more about understanding what else might be going on in another person's head.

    Like... you know how when you're a kid, and you're shocked to see your teacher at the grocery store? You hadn't really thought about it, but you had somehow assumed that your teacher lived at the school, and perhaps didn't need to eat. And the important part there is, you hadn't really thought about it.

    I think that's sort of an early level of the realization, "Other people are also people, like me. They have lives of their own, they think their own thoughts, just like me." There are deeper understandings of this that people develop, like perhaps realizing, "I sort of think of life like a story, and I'm the main character. But other people must also think of themselves as the main character. To an outside observer, there's no reason why my perspective is more correct."

    And I think that in adulthood, some people develop that sensibility in much deeper and more profound ways. They can put themselves in another person's shoes, and not just feel empathy for them, but actually understand how things must appear to another person. They can think about things like, "I disagree with you, but I completely understand why you think that, and I'm not sure you're wrong." Some adults develop very strong skills and impulses along those lines, while others don't. Many people, even into adulthood, think as simply as, "I disagree with you, and therefore you must be wrong and stupid."

    I'm not sure that's what they mean, but I would guess that's the sort of thing being included in "keeping track of what other people feel, know, and believe."