Deep Structures of Collaboration: Physiological Correlates of Collective Intelligence and Group Satisfaction

Collective intelligence (CI), a group's capacity to perform a wide variety of tasks, is a key factor in successful collaboration. Group composition, particularly diversity and member social perceptiveness, are consistent predictors of CI, but we have limited knowledge about the mechanisms underlying their effects. To address this gap, we examine how physiological synchrony, as an indicator of coordination and rapport, relates to CI in computer-mediated teams, and if synchrony might serve as a mechanism explaining the effect of group composition on CI. We present results from a laboratory experiment where 60 dyads completed the Test of Collective Intelligence (TCI) together online and rated their group satisfaction, while wearing physiological sensors. We find that synchrony in facial expressions (indicative of shared experience) was associated with CI and synchrony in electrodermal activity (indicative of shared arousal) with group satisfaction. Furthermore, various forms of synchrony mediated the effect of member diversity and social perceptiveness on CI and group satisfaction. Our results have important implications for online collaborations and distributed teams.

[1]  C. D. De Dreu,et al.  Task versus relationship conflict, team performance, and team member satisfaction: a meta-analysis. , 2003, The Journal of applied psychology.

[2]  J. Cacioppo,et al.  Mind at ease puts a smile on the face: psychophysiological evidence that processing facilitation elicits positive affect. , 2001, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[3]  R B MALMO,et al.  Activation: a neuropsychological dimension. , 1959, Rassegna giuliana di medicina.

[4]  David A. Sbarra,et al.  Methodological Advances for Detecting Physiological Synchrony During Dyadic Interactions , 2013 .

[5]  A. Woolley,et al.  Collective Intelligence and Group Performance , 2015 .

[6]  Thomas A. Timmerman.  Racial Diversity, Age Diversity, Interdependence, and Team Performance , 2000 .

[7]  S. Baron-Cohen,et al.  The "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" Test revised version: a study with normal adults, and adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. , 2001, Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines.

[8]  J. Cohn,et al.  Movement Differences between Deliberate and Spontaneous Facial Expressions: Zygomaticus Major Action in Smiling , 2006, Journal of nonverbal behavior.

[9]  Erin V. Lehman,et al.  Team Diagnostic Survey , 2005 .

[10]  Kristopher J Preacher,et al.  Effect size measures for mediation models: quantitative strategies for communicating indirect effects. , 2011, Psychological methods.

[11]  Jim Blascovich,et al.  African Americans and High Blood Pressure: The Role of Stereotype Threat , 2001, Psychological science.

[12]  M. Akinola,et al.  Measuring the Pulse of an Organization: Integrating Physiological Measures into the Organizational Scholar's Toolbox , 2010 .

[13]  David Engel,et al.  What Makes a Strong Team?: Using Collective Intelligence to Predict Team Performance in League of Legends , 2017, CSCW.

[14]  Julian Paul Keenan,et al.  " I think I know what you mean": The role of theory of mind in collaborative communication , 2007 .

[15]  Bar-Ilan.  Parent–Infant Synchrony Biological Foundations and Developmental Outcomes , 2007 .

[16]  Agata Rozga,et al.  Using electrodermal activity to recognize ease of engagement in children during social interactions , 2014, UbiComp.

[17]  K. W. Phillips,et al.  The Effects of Categorically Based Expectations on Minority Influence: The Importance of Congruence , 2003, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[18]  Michael J. Hove,et al.  It's all in the timing: Interpersonal synchrony increases affiliation , 2009 .

[19]  P. Ekman,et al.  Facial action coding system , 2019 .

[20]  A. Manstead,et al.  Can Duchenne smiles be feigned? New evidence on felt and false smiles. , 2009, Emotion.

[21]  D. Harrison,et al.  What's the difference? Diversity constructs as separation, variety, or disparity in organizations. , 2007 .

[22]  Patrick Baudisch,et al.  GravitySpace: tracking users and their poses in a smart room using a pressure-sensing floor , 2013, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[23]  G. Horstmann,et al.  Coherence between Emotion and Facial Expression: Evidence from Laboratory Experiments , 2013 .

[24]  M. Benedek,et al.  A continuous measure of phasic electrodermal activity , 2010, Journal of Neuroscience Methods.

[25]  Walter Bender,et al.  The Impact of Increased Awareness While Face-to-Face , 2007, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[26]  David C. Atkins,et al.  The association of therapist empathy and synchrony in vocally encoded arousal. , 2014, Journal of counseling psychology.

[27]  Frank J. Bernieri,et al.  Coordinated movement and rapport in teacher-student interactions , 1988 .

[28]  J. Eskildsen,et al.  Physiological evidence of interpersonal dynamics in a cooperative production task , 2016, Physiology & Behavior.

[29]  D. van Knippenberg,et al.  Work group diversity. , 2007, Annual review of psychology.

[30]  J. K. Murnighan,et al.  Demographic Diversity and Faultlines: The Compositional DYnamics of Organizational Groups , 1998 .

[31]  Janienke Sturm,et al.  Influencing social dynamics in meetings through a peripheral display , 2007, ICMI '07.

[32]  Eliot R. Smith,et al.  From prejudice to intergroup emotions : differentiated reactions to social groups , 2002 .

[33]  G E DEANE,et al.  Human heart rate responses during experimentally induced anxiety. , 1961, Journal of experimental psychology.

[34]  P. McLeod,et al.  Ethnic Diversity and Creativity in Small Groups , 1996 .

[35]  M G Coles,et al.  Cardiac and respiratory activity during visual search. , 1972, Journal of experimental psychology.

[36]  Bradley L. Kirkman,et al.  The Impact of Team Empowerment on Virtual Team Performance: The Moderating Role of Face-to-Face Interaction , 2004 .

[37]  Yuichi Nakamura,et al.  Smart meeting systems: A survey of state-of-the-art and open issues , 2010, CSUR.

[38]  M. Maznevski,et al.  Bridging Space Over Time: Global Virtual Team Dynamics and Effectiveness , 2000 .

[39]  C. Jutten,et al.  Touch increases autonomic coupling between romantic partners , 2014, Front. Behav. Neurosci..

[40]  S. Mohammed,et al.  Cognitive Diversity and Consensus in Group Decision Making: The Role of Inputs, Processes, and Outcomes. , 2001, Organizational behavior and human decision processes.

[41]  C. Chabris,et al.  Reading the Mind in the Eyes or Reading between the Lines? Theory of Mind Predicts Collective Intelligence Equally Well Online and Face-To-Face , 2014, PloS one.

[42]  I. Couzin,et al.  Emergent Sensing of Complex Environments by Mobile Animal Groups , 2013, Science.

[43]  Christoph Riedl,et al.  Competition and Collective Intelligence: Do Women Always Make Groups Smarter? , 2016 .

[44]  Wendy E. Mackay,et al.  CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 2013, CHI 2013.

[45]  H. Gardner.  Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century , 1999 .

[46]  E. Duffy,et al.  The psychological significance of the concept of arousal or activation. , 1957, Psychological review.

[47]  M. Lindell,et al.  A Revised Index of Interrater Agreement for Multi-Item Ratings of a Single Target , 1999 .

[48]  A. Roepstorff,et al.  Building trust: Heart rate synchrony and arousal during joint action increased by public goods game , 2015, Physiology & Behavior.

[49]  James Danckert,et al.  Characterizing the psychophysiological signature of boredom , 2014, Experimental Brain Research.

[50]  L. Carstensen,et al.  The influence of age and gender on affect, physiology, and their interrelations: a study of long-term marriages. , 1994, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[51]  D. Meyer,et al.  Supporting Online Material Materials and Methods Som Text Figs. S1 to S6 References Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups , 2022 .

[52]  Deborah M Gordon,et al.  Collective Wisdom of Ants. , 2016, Scientific American.

[53]  Robert D. Miewald.  Administrative Science Quarterly , 1981 .

[54]  R. O’Connell,et al.  Self-Alert Training: Volitional modulation of autonomic arousal improves sustained attention , 2008, Neuropsychologia.

[55]  Candace Ferrell,et al.  Tacit Coordination in Anticipation of Small Group Task Completion , 1996 .

[56]  S. Erath,et al.  Brief Report: A Pilot Study of Parent–Child Biobehavioral Synchrony in Autism Spectrum Disorder , 2015, Journal of autism and developmental disorders.

[57]  J. Campos,et al.  Affect, verbalization, and directional fractionation of autonomic responses. , 2008, Psychophysiology.

[58]  C. Macrae,et al.  The rhythm of rapport: Interpersonal synchrony and social perception , 2009 .

[59]  Ishani Aggarwal,et al.  The Insensitive Ruins It All: Compositional and Compilational Influences of Social Sensitivity on Collective Intelligence in Groups , 2016, Front. Psychol..

[60]  Young Ji Kim,et al.  Work Together, Play Smart: Collective Intelligence in League of Legends Teams , 2012 .

[61]  D. Hebb.  Drives and the C.N.S. (conceptual nervous system). , 1955, Psychological review.

[62]  David Engel,et al.  Collective Intelligence in Computer-Mediated Collaboration Emerges in Different Contexts and Cultures , 2015, CHI.

[63]  Donald J. Berndt,et al.  Using Dynamic Time Warping to Find Patterns in Time Series , 1994, KDD Workshop.

[64]  D. DeSteno,et al.  The rhythm of joint action: Synchrony promotes cooperative ability , 2010 .

[65]  D. Kahneman,et al.  Pupillary, heart rate, and skin resistance changes during a mental task. , 1969, Journal of experimental psychology.

[66]  Karrie Karahalios,et al.  Conversation Clock: Visualizing audio patterns in co-located groups , 2007, 2007 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'07).

[67]  N. Ambady,et al.  Thin slices of expressive behavior as predictors of interpersonal consequences: A meta-analysis. , 1992 .

[68]  Peter Robinson,et al.  Cross-dataset learning and person-specific normalisation for automatic Action Unit detection , 2015, 2015 11th IEEE International Conference and Workshops on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG).

[69]  Johannes Schöning,et al.  Investigating the effects of using biofeedback as visual stress indicator during video-mediated collaboration , 2014, CHI.

[70]  C. Frith,et al.  The skin conductance orienting response as an index of attention , 1983, Biological Psychology.

[71]  Scott S. Wiltermuth,et al.  Synchrony and Cooperation , 2009, Psychological science.

[72]  Vanessa Urch Druskat,et al.  LINKING EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND PERFORMANCE AT WORK , 2005 .

[73]  Alex Pentland,et al.  Meeting mediator: enhancing group collaboration with sociometric feedback , 2008, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[74]  R. Nikula.  Psychological correlates of nonspecific skin conductance responses. , 1991, Psychophysiology.

[75]  J. Cacioppo,et al.  Principles of psychophysiology : physical, social, and inferential elements , 1990 .

[76]  Judith S. Olson,et al.  Analysis of gestures in face-to-face design teams provides guidance for how to use groupware in design , 1995, Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems.

[77]  H. Tajfel,et al.  The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior. , 2004 .

[78]  Jeremy P. Birnholtz,et al.  Visualizing real-time language-based feedback on teamwork behavior in computer-mediated groups , 2009, CHI.

[79]  A. Hayes.  Introduction to Mediation, Moderation, and Conditional Process Analysis: A Regression-Based Approach , 2013 .

[80]  Anita Williams Woolley,et al.  Collective Intelligence and Group Learning , 2017 .

[81]  J. Mathieu,et al.  Modeling reciprocal team cohesion-performance relationships, as impacted by shared leadership and members' competence. , 2015, The Journal of applied psychology.

[82]  Frances J. Milliken,et al.  Diversity and creativity in work groups: A dynamic perspective on the affective and cognitive processes that link diversity and performance. , 2003 .

[83]  Mohan M. Trivedi,et al.  Activity monitoring and summarization for an intelligent meeting room , 2000, Proceedings Workshop on Human Motion.

[84]  Frank J. Bernieri,et al.  Synchrony, pseudosynchrony, and dissynchrony: Measuring the entrainment process in mother-infant interactions. , 1988 .

[85]  Boris E. R. de Ruyter,et al.  Introduction to this Special Issue * on Awareness Systems Design , 2007 .

[86]  G. Northcraft,et al.  You have printed the following article : Why Differences Make a Difference : A Field Study of Diversity , Conflict , and Performance in Workgroups , 2007 .

[87]  J. Lacey.  Psychophysiological approaches to the evaluation of psychotherapeutic process and outcome. , 1959 .

[88]  D. McIntosh,et al.  Sponteous facial mimicry, liking and emotional contagion , 2006 .

[89]  Regan L. Mandryk,et al.  Physiological indicators for the evaluation of co-located collaborative play , 2004, CSCW.

[90]  Eric Fombonne,et al.  Preface , 1998 .

[91]  David A. Waldman,et al.  Using Physiological Methods to Study Emotions in Organizations , 2015 .

[92]  Geoffrey Bird,et al.  Training social cognition: From imitation to Theory of Mind , 2012, Cognition.

[93]  Geoffrey Bird,et al.  Social attitudes modulate automatic imitation , 2010 .

[94]  J. Tomaka,et al.  Patterns of emotion-specific appraisal, coping, and cardiovascular reactivity during an ongoing emotional episode. , 2002, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[95]  Sigal G. Barsade,et al.  Human abilities: emotional intelligence. , 2008, Annual review of psychology.

[96]  Nicola Fox,et al.  Cardiovascular system. , 2007, Nursing Standard.

[97]  B. C. Lacey,et al.  10 – SOME AUTONOMIC-CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM INTERRELATIONSHIPS , 1970 .

[98]  B. Mullen,et al.  The relation between group cohesiveness and performance: An integration. , 1994 .