People are social animals. That is widely understood, at least at a superficial level. But the degree to which social interaction influences us is an intense area of research, constantly yielding new insights. And some of those findings counter deep-seated beliefs and cultural norms.
There was quite a stir recently when new research emerged that shows that IQ is less important in group effectiveness than social sensitivity:
Recent research has shown that that raw intelligence is not the most critical factor in group productivity. Adding a highly intelligent person to a group involved in a difficult task does not increase the likelihood that the task will be accomplished. It turns out, according to Anita Wooley of CMU:
What mattered instead was the social sensitivity of individual members, the proportion of women (who tend to be more sensitive) in each group, and a balanced participation of conversation.
So the capability of a group to assimilate a challenge, and effectively respond to it — or, social cognition — depends on many factors, and less on individual IQ than we might assume.
The proportion of women aspect turns out to be social sensitivity again, not some other psychological or physiological attribute. And, again, balancing participation of the parties involved is significantly easier in groups with higher numbers of people with greater social sensitivity.
Along these same lines, Oscar Ybarra has shown that people’s individual cognitive performance increases after having 10-15 minute friendly conversation. Friendly give-and-take seems to help people think more clearly, independent of domain. This is a wonderful and strong argument against stress-inducing work contexts, and suggests that brain chemistry is involved. The friendliness side effect of regular conversations with people that are interested in you, and make you feel like you matter, actually makes you smarter. So the extra bang that comes from the extra time at the espresso bar with a friend might be because of the talk, and not the extra shot of coffee.
In the world of learning, new evidence suggests that socially connecting students — using tools like Twitter — not only makes a class more fun, but can improve grades. Reynol Junco led a study at Lock Haven College, where the students were required to use Twitter, and to participate socially, for example, commenting on class readings. Not only did the tweeters get twice the improvement in engagement than the control group, the twitterers also hit a half grade point increase on their overall GPA for the semester. Once again social connection and friendly interaction has really tangible results. What would have happened, I wonder, if they were doing the same in all their classes? With all the students tied in?
And perhaps the most interesting of all, is the impact that certain sorts of social interaction have on our perception of time. We have all experienced the sensation that time ‘flies’ when we are engaged in something fun or exciting, and drags when we are doing something boring or annoying. It turns out that Robert Meade studied this and determined the duration of tasks, or the work day as a whole, is perceived as being shorter when people believe they are making progress against goals. I believe that is one of the reasons people are adopting streaming applications for business — like Yammer, Socialcast, Podio, IBM Connections, BantamLive, Salesforce Chatter, and dozens of others — is because they support Meade’s observation.
As I recently wrote,
Simply by providing a context in which users establish what they are working on, and posting notes about their progress — or asking other for help to make progress — and receiving feedback as they make progress, workers using streaming apps are likely to experience time as moving more quickly. This is either associated in our minds with other experiences that make us happy, or directly makes us happy. In either case, it seems fairly obvious that users are happier when exposed to social work contexts with these characteristics.
Management may have a hard time accepting the soft benefits of time compression and the way that tools modify our consciousness, but they will readily accept improvement in productivity and work attitudes.
Note that incentives can be amazingly minimal: just the positive regard of close contacts can be enough.
We are in a time of great research on social cognition, but the biggest testing ground is on the web, where literally billions of people are connecting on an unprecedented scale. All too often we try to reduce what is happening there to ‘collaboration.’ But calling what goes on when people are connected by social tools to ‘collaboration’ is like calling the experience of going to college ‘studying’. There’s a whole lot more going on, and we are seeing all sorts of research that challenges conventional wisdom about what works best in business, media, education, and on the personal level.
The most fundamental change in our thinking is about thinking itself: we are not at our best when we are sitting alone, thinking deep thoughts. On the contrary, our greatest contribution, inspiration, and learning are likely to come from close interaction with others. And it makes the time pass quickly, as well.
