High-Throughput Experiments on Group Dynamics

@article{almaatouq2021task,

title = {Task complexity moderates group synergy},

author = {Almaatouq, Abdullah and Alsobay, Mohammed and Yin, Ming and Watts, Duncan J.},

url = {https://www.pnas.org/content/118/36/e2101062118},

doi = {10.1073/pnas.2101062118},

year  = {2021},

date = {2021-09-07},

journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences},

volume = {118},

number = {36},

abstract = {Complexity—defined in terms of the number of components and the nature of the interdependencies between them—is clearly a relevant feature of all tasks that groups perform. Yet the role that task complexity plays in determining group performance remains poorly understood, in part because no clear language exists to express complexity in a way that allows for straightforward comparisons across tasks. Here we avoid this analytical difficulty by identifying a class of tasks for which complexity can be varied systematically while keeping all other elements of the task unchanged. We then test the effects of task complexity in a preregistered two-phase experiment in which 1,200 individuals were evaluated on a series of tasks of varying complexity (phase 1) and then randomly assigned to solve similar tasks either in interacting groups or as independent individuals (phase 2). We find that interacting groups are as fast as the fastest individual and more efficient than the most efficient individual for complex tasks but not for simpler ones. Leveraging our highly granular digital data, we define and precisely measure group process losses and synergistic gains and show that the balance between the two switches signs at intermediate values of task complexity. Finally, we find that interacting groups generate more solutions more rapidly and explore the solution space more broadly than independent problem solvers, finding higher-quality solutions than all but the highest-scoring individuals.},

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pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{cao2021my,

title = {My Team Will Go On: Differentiating High and Low Viability Teams through Team Interaction},

author = {Hancheng Cao and Vivian Yang and Victor Chen and Yu Jin Lee and Lydia Stone and N'godjigui Junior Diarrassouba and Mark Whiting and Michael Bernstein},

url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.07292},

doi = {10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn},

year  = {2021},

date = {2021-01-05},

journal = {Proceedings of the ACM Human-Computer Interaction},

volume = {4},

number = {CSCW3},

pages = {1-27},

abstract = {Understanding team viability — a team’s capacity for sustained and future success — is essential for building effective teams. In this study, we aggregate features drawn from the organizational behavior literature to train a viability classification model over a dataset of 669 10-minute text conversations of online teams. We train classifiers to identify teams at the top decile (most viable teams), 50th percentile (above a median split), and bottom decile (least viable teams), then characterize the attributes of teams at each of these viability levels. We find that a lasso regression model achieves an accuracy of .74–.92 AUC ROC under different thresholds of classifying viability scores. From these models, we identify the use of exclusive language such as ‘but’ and ‘except’, and the use of second person pronouns, as the most predictive features for detecting the most viable teams, suggesting that active engagement with others’ ideas is a crucial signal of a viable team. Only a small fraction of the 10-minute discussion, as little as 70 seconds, is required for predicting the viability of team interaction. This work suggests opportunities for teams to assess, track, and visualize their own viability in real time as they collaborate.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{almaatouq2021empirica,

title = {Empirica: a virtual lab for high-throughput macro-level experiments},

author = {Abdullah Almaatouq and Joshua Becker and James P Houghton and Nicolas Paton and Duncan J Watts and Mark E Whiting},

url = {https://drive.google.com/file/d/1asyd8onp_2df10W1AbzPOyar6WknEiCU/view},

doi = {10.3758/s13428-020-01535-9},

year  = {2021},

date = {2021-01-01},

journal = {Behavior Research Methods},

pages = {1--14},

publisher = {Springer},

abstract = {Virtual labs allow researchers to design high-throughput and macro-level experiments that are not feasible in traditional in-person physical lab settings. Despite the increasing popularity of online research, researchers still face many technical and logistical barriers when designing and deploying virtual lab experiments. While several platforms exist to facilitate the development of virtual lab experiments, they typically present researchers with a stark trade-off between usability and functionality. We introduce Empirica: a modular virtual lab that offers a solution to the usability--functionality trade-off by employing a ``flexible defaults'' design strategy. This strategy enables us to maintain complete ``build anything'' flexibility while offering a development platform that is accessible to novice programmers. Empirica's architecture is designed to allow for parameterizable experimental designs, reusable protocols, and rapid development. These features will increase the accessibility of virtual lab experiments, remove barriers to innovation in experiment design, and enable rapid progress in the understanding of human behavior.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{whiting2020can,

title = {Can We Just Start Over Again? Resetting Remote Team Dynamics},

author = {Mark Whiting and Michael Bernstein},

url = {https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2020/07/NFW-Whiting-et-al.pdf},

year  = {2020},

date = {2020-07-07},

abstract = {Interactions defining teamwork today are heavily influenced by constraints and expectations found in in-person teams, however, remote collaboration provides the opportunity to try new ways to make teams work. One foundation of teamwork is persistent identity—we are who we were last time we worked together. Breaking with the expectation of in-person teams, we present a system that affords discontinuous identity using two-way pseudonym masking—enabling teams with new behaviors to arise from the same group of individuals. With this scaffold, a novel family of experiments, comparing the same group across multiple fresh starts, are possible. Further, interventions that involve choosing between versions of the same team are unlocked. We present an overview of experiments and interventions leveraging this system, and propose methods for its broader use in organizations enacting the future of work.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{whiting2020parallel,

title = {Parallel Worlds: Repeated Initializations of the Same Team To Improve Team Viability},

author = {Mark Whiting and Irena Gao and Michelle Xing and Junior Diarrassouba N’godjigui and Tonya Nguyen and Michael Bernstein},

url = {https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mark_Whiting3/publication/341743251_Parallel_Worlds_Repeated_Initializations_of_the_Same_Team_to_Improve_Team_Viability/links/5ed6931045851529452a2738/Parallel-Worlds-Repeated-Initializations-of-the-Same-Team-to-Improve-Team-Viability.pdf},

doi = {10.1145/3392877},

year  = {2020},

date = {2020-05-01},

journal = {Proceedings of the ACM Human-Computer Interaction},

volume = {4},

number = {CSCW1},

pages = {22},

abstract = {A team’s early interactions are influential: small behaviors cascade, driving the team either toward successful collaboration or toward fracture. Would a team be more viable if it could undo initial interactional missteps and try again? We introduce a technique that supports online and remote teams in creating multiple parallel worlds: the same team meets many times, led to believe that each convening is with a new team due to pseudonym masking while actual membership remains static. Afterward, the team moves forward with the parallel world with the highest viability by using the same pseudonyms and conversation history from that instance. In two experiments, we find that this technique improves team viability: teams that are reconvened from the highest-viability parallel world are significantly more viable than the same group meeting in a new parallel world. Our work suggests parallel worlds can help teams start off on the right foot — and stay there.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{whiting2019did,

title = {Did It Have To End This Way? Understanding the Consistency of Team Fracture},

author = {Mark Whiting and Allie Blaising and Chloe Barreau and Laura Fiuza and Nik Marda and Melissa Valentine and Michael Bernstein},

url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3359311},

doi = {10.1145/3359311},

year  = {2019},

date = {2019-11-01},

journal = {Proceedings of the ACM Human-Computer Interaction},

volume = {3},

number = {209},

pages = {23},

abstract = {Was a problematic team always doomed to frustration, or could it have ended another way? In this paper, we study the consistency of team fracture: a loss of team viability so severe that the team no longer wants to work together. Understanding whether team fracture is driven by the membership of the team, or by how their collaboration unfolded, motivates the design of interventions that either identify compatible teammates or ensure effective early interactions. We introduce an online experiment that reconvenes the same team without members realizing that they have worked together before, enabling us to temporarily erase previous team dynamics. Participants in our study completed a series of tasks across multiple teams, including one reconvened team, and privately blacklisted any teams that they would not want to work with again. We identify fractured teams as those blacklisted by half the members. We find that reconvened teams are strikingly polarized by task in the consistency of their fracture outcomes. On a creative task, teams might as well have been a completely different set of people: the same teams changed their fracture outcomes at a random chance rate. On a cognitive conflict and on an intellective task, the team instead replayed the same dynamics without realizing it, rarely changing their fracture outcomes. These results indicate that, for some tasks, team fracture can be strongly influenced by interactions in the first moments of a team’s collaboration, and that interventions targeting these initial moments may be critical to scaffolding long-lasting teams.},

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pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}