為什么有些團(tuán)隊(duì)比其他團(tuán)隊(duì)聰明?

Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others

為什么有些團(tuán)隊(duì)比其他團(tuán)隊(duì)聰明?

ENDLESS meetings that do little but waste everyone’s time. Dysfunctional committees that take two steps back for every one forward. Project teams that engage in wishful groupthinking rather than honest analysis. Everyone who is part of an organization — a company, a nonprofit, a condo board — has experienced these and other pathologies that can occur when human beings try to work together in groups.

無窮無盡的會(huì)議幾乎毫無用處，只是浪費(fèi)每個(gè)人的時(shí)間。功能失調(diào)的委員會(huì)每前進(jìn)一步就倒退兩步。項(xiàng)目組總是進(jìn)行想當(dāng)然的小組思考，而非誠實(shí)的分析。只要你屬于某個(gè)組織——公司、非營利組織、業(yè)主委員會(huì)——都會(huì)遇到類似的問題，這些問題在人類共事時(shí)經(jīng)常出現(xiàn)。

But does teamwork have to be a lost cause? Psychologists have been working on the problem for a long time. And for good reason: Nowadays, though we may still idolize the charismatic leader or creative genius, almost every decision of consequence is made by a group. When Facebook’s board of directors establishes a privacy policy, when the C.I.A.’s operatives strike a suspected terrorist hide-out or when a jury decides whether to convict a defendant, what matters is not just the intelligence and wisdom of the individual actors involved. Groups of smart people can make horrible decisions — or great ones.

但是團(tuán)隊(duì)合作一定是徒勞無功的嗎?心理學(xué)家們已經(jīng)研究這個(gè)問題很長時(shí)間了。他們的研究很有必要：如今，雖然我們可能仍然崇拜有魅力的領(lǐng)導(dǎo)或創(chuàng)意天才，但是幾乎每個(gè)重要決定都是團(tuán)隊(duì)做出的。當(dāng)Facebook的董事會(huì)制定一個(gè)隱私政策時(shí)，當(dāng)美國中央情報(bào)局的特工們襲擊一個(gè)可疑的恐怖分子藏身處時(shí)，或者當(dāng)陪審團(tuán)決定被告是否有罪時(shí)，重要的不是單個(gè)參與者的聰明才智。一群聰明的人可能會(huì)做出糟糕的決定，也可能做出偉大的決定。

Psychologists have known for a century that individuals vary in their cognitive ability. But are some groups, like some people, reliably smarter than others?

心理學(xué)家們一百年前已經(jīng)知道，人們的認(rèn)知能力各不相同。但是團(tuán)隊(duì)是否也像人一樣，聰明程度有所不同?

Working with several colleagues and students, we set out to answer that question. In our first two studies, which we published with Alex Pentland and Nada Hashmi of M.I.T. in 2010 in the journal Science, we grouped 697 volunteer participants into teams of two to five members. Each team worked together to complete a series of short tasks, which were selected to represent the varied kinds of problems that groups are called upon to solve in the real world. One task involved logical analysis, another brainstorming; others emphasized coordination, planning and moral reasoning.

我們幾個(gè)同事、學(xué)生開始尋找這個(gè)問題的答案。我們的前兩項(xiàng)研究是和麻省理工學(xué)院的亞歷克斯·彭特蘭(Alex Pentland)、娜達(dá)·哈什米(Nada Hashmi)合作進(jìn)行的，2010年發(fā)表在《科學(xué)》(Science)雜志上。我們召集了697名志愿者，分成二至五人的團(tuán)隊(duì)。每個(gè)團(tuán)隊(duì)協(xié)力完成一系列小任務(wù)，這些精選出來的任務(wù)代表了現(xiàn)實(shí)生活中組建團(tuán)隊(duì)通常想解決的各種問題。有些任務(wù)需要邏輯分析或頭腦風(fēng)暴;有些則強(qiáng)調(diào)協(xié)調(diào)、計(jì)劃和道德說服。

Individual intelligence, as psychologists measure it, is defined by its generality: People with good vocabularies, for instance, also tend to have good math skills, even though we often think of those abilities as distinct. The results of our studies showed that this same kind of general intelligence also exists for teams. On average, the groups that did well on one task did well on the others, too. In other words, some teams were simply smarter than others.

心理學(xué)家們經(jīng)過測(cè)試發(fā)現(xiàn)，個(gè)人智力具有普遍性：比如，詞匯量豐富的人往往計(jì)算能力也強(qiáng)，雖然我們通常認(rèn)為這些能力沒有關(guān)系。我們的研究結(jié)果表明，團(tuán)隊(duì)也具有這種普遍智力。平均說來，那些在某項(xiàng)任務(wù)上做得好的團(tuán)隊(duì)其他任務(wù)也完成得比較好。換句話說，有些團(tuán)隊(duì)就是比其他團(tuán)隊(duì)聰明。

We next tried to define what characteristics distinguished the smarter teams from the rest, and we were a bit surprised by the answers we got. We gave each volunteer an individual I.Q. test, but teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on our collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group’s success.

然后，我們想找出聰明團(tuán)隊(duì)具有哪些特點(diǎn)，答案有點(diǎn)出乎我們的意料。我們單獨(dú)測(cè)試了每個(gè)志愿者的智商，發(fā)現(xiàn)平均智商較高的團(tuán)隊(duì)在集體智力任務(wù)中的得分并不比平均智商較低的團(tuán)隊(duì)高。成員更外向、或者更愿意為團(tuán)隊(duì)成功做出積極貢獻(xiàn)的團(tuán)隊(duì)也沒有表現(xiàn)得更出色。

Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.

相反，最聰明的團(tuán)隊(duì)具有以下三個(gè)特點(diǎn)。

First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.

第一，團(tuán)隊(duì)成員在小組討論中的貢獻(xiàn)比較均衡，而不是讓一兩個(gè)人主導(dǎo)團(tuán)隊(duì)。

Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.

第二，聰明團(tuán)隊(duì)的成員在一項(xiàng)名為“通過眼神讀心”的測(cè)試中得分較高，這項(xiàng)測(cè)試測(cè)量的是僅通過眼神解讀復(fù)雜情緒狀態(tài)的能力。

Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.

最后一點(diǎn)，女人多的團(tuán)隊(duì)表現(xiàn)得比男人多的團(tuán)隊(duì)好。“多樣性”(男女人數(shù)相當(dāng))對(duì)團(tuán)隊(duì)智慧無關(guān)緊要，只要女人多就行。不過，最后這個(gè)特點(diǎn)的部分原因是女人總體來說比男人更善于“讀心”。

In a new study that we published with David Engel and Lisa X. Jing of M.I.T. last month in PLoS One, we replicated these earlier findings, but with a twist. We randomly assigned each of 68 teams to complete our collective intelligence test in one of two conditions. Half of the teams worked face to face, like the teams in our earlier studies. The other half worked online, with no ability to see any of their teammates. Online collaboration is on the rise, with tools like Skype, Google Drive and old-fashioned email enabling groups that never meet to execute complex projects. We wanted to see whether groups that worked online would still demonstrate collective intelligence, and whether social ability would matter as much when people communicated purely by typing messages into a browser.

我們和麻省理工學(xué)院的大衛(wèi)·恩格爾(David Engel)、麗莎·X·征(Lisa X. Jing)進(jìn)行了一項(xiàng)新研究，該研究上月發(fā)表在《公共科學(xué)圖書館期刊》(PLoS One)上。我們?cè)俅悟?yàn)證了之前的研究結(jié)果，同時(shí)有了一個(gè)新發(fā)現(xiàn)。我們隨機(jī)安排68個(gè)團(tuán)隊(duì)在兩種不同條件下完成集體智慧測(cè)試。其中一半面對(duì)面交流，之前的研究都是這樣進(jìn)行的。另一半通過網(wǎng)絡(luò)交流，看不到其他隊(duì)友。如今，網(wǎng)絡(luò)協(xié)作越來越多，因?yàn)镾kype、谷歌硬盤和傳統(tǒng)電子郵件等溝通工具讓從未謀面的團(tuán)隊(duì)也能執(zhí)行復(fù)雜項(xiàng)目。我們想看看通過網(wǎng)絡(luò)協(xié)作的團(tuán)隊(duì)是否仍表現(xiàn)出集體智慧，當(dāng)人們完全通過往瀏覽器上輸入信息進(jìn)行交流時(shí)，社交能力是否還那么重要。

And they did. Online and off, some teams consistently worked smarter than others. More surprisingly, the most important ingredients for a smart team remained constant regardless of its mode of interaction: members who communicated a lot, participated equally and possessed good emotion-reading skills.

結(jié)果發(fā)現(xiàn)，依然如此。不管是網(wǎng)絡(luò)交流還是面對(duì)面交流，有些團(tuán)隊(duì)總是比其他團(tuán)隊(duì)聰明。更令人意外的是，不管采取哪種交流方式，聰明團(tuán)隊(duì)最重要的特點(diǎn)仍是這些：充分交流，平等參與，讀心能力強(qiáng)。

This last finding was another surprise. Emotion-reading mattered just as much for the online teams whose members could not see one another as for the teams that worked face to face. What makes teams smart must be not just the ability to read facial expressions, but a more general ability, known as “Theory of Mind,” to consider and keep track of what other people feel, know and believe.

最后這一點(diǎn)是另一個(gè)出人意料之處。對(duì)通過網(wǎng)絡(luò)交流的團(tuán)隊(duì)來說，讀心能力也同樣重要。聰明團(tuán)隊(duì)的成員不僅具有解讀面部表情的能力，還具有一種名為“心智理論”(Theory of Mind)的更普遍的能力，它包括考慮和了解他人的感受和所知所信的能力。