Do Meetings Make Us Stupid?
Meetings really do decrease our cognitive abilities.
Attending meetings lowers IQ, makes you stupid - Rebecca Smith
Meetings make people stupid because they impair their ability to think for themselves, scientists have found.
The performance of people in IQ tests after meetings is significantly lower than if they are left on their own, with women more likely to perform worse than men.
Researchers at the Virginia Tech Crilion Research institute in the US said people’s performance dropped when they were judged against their peers.
Read Montague, who led the study, said: “You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain-dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain-dead as well.
“We started with individuals who were matched for their IQ. Yet when we placed them in small groups, ranked their performance on cognitive tasks against their peers, and broadcast those rankings to them, we saw dramatic drops in the ability of some study subjects to solve problems. The social feedback had a significant effect.”
Students from two universities with an average IQ of 126 were subsequently pitted against each other, and told how they were performing in comparison to the others after answering each question.
Researchers found that most people performed worse when they were ranked against their peers, suggesting the social situation itself affected how well they completed the IQ tests.
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The study raises questions over how intelligence is measured and whether it is fixed, experts said.
Co-author Steven Quartz, professor of philosophy in the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, said: “This study tells us the idea that IQ is something we can reliably measure in isolation without considering how it interacts with social context is essentially flawed.
“Furthermore, this suggests that the idea of a division between social and cognitive processing in the brain is really pretty artificial. The two deeply interact with each other.”
There is a growing body of evidence for social cognition, showing how tightly our reasoning is linked to social context and interactions. Obviously, learning what makes us more productive is primary, but seeing proof that some behaviors have negative impacts on our reasoning — like small-group competition of the sort that can occur in meetings — means that we should be reorganizing work to minimize those effects.
Source: independent.ie
