How intermittent breaks in interaction improve collective intelligence
Abstract
Many human endeavors—from teams and organizations to crowds and democracies—rely on solving problems collectively. Prior research has shown that when people interact and influence each other while solving complex problems, the average problem-solving performance of the group increases, but the best solution of the group actually decreases in quality. We find that when such influence is intermittent it improves the average while maintaining a high maximum performance. We also show that storing solutions for quick recall is similar to constant social influence. Instead of supporting more transparency, the results imply that technologies and organizations should be redesigned to intermittently isolate people from each other’s work for best collective performance in solving complex problems.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Aug 13, 2018
- Source ID
- 10.1073/pnas.1802407115
Entities
People
- David Lazer
- Ethan Bernstein
- Jesse Shore
Organizations
- Boston University
- Harvard University
- Northeastern University
- Office of Naval Research