Research shows that especially for complex and uncertain problems, maintaining and integrating diverse information and perspectives is a critical driver of collective performance.
However, people influence each other when they interact to solve problems. Social influence can result in too much copying behaviour, driving out beneficial diversity and resulting in a collective convergence on a suboptimal solution.
Despite this tendency, groups are capable of handling complex problems that individuals themselves cannot. Innovation and invention are also widely thought to be social processes, in which ideas or partial ideas from multiple individuals are recombined.
The research
IIn this research paper, Ethan Bernstein, Jesse Shore and David Lazer argue that a major unresolved question in collective intelligence in complex tasks is whether it is possible to get the benefits of social influence in the form of collective learning without the associated costs of premature convergence on ideas.
In this experimental study, participants were given a complex task to solve and assigned to one of three groups or conditions. One-third of participants were assigned to a ‘constant ties’ condition, in which they could see the solutions of their neighbours in their group. One-third of participants were assigned to an ‘intermittent ties’ condition, in which they were able to see their neighbours’ solutions intermittently. The final third were assigned to a ‘no ties’ condition, in which participants could never see their neighbours’ solutions.
The results
The authors found that when social influence is intermittent it provides the benefits of constant social influence without the costs or premature convergence of ideas. Groups in the intermittent social influence condition found the optimum solution to the task frequently but had a high mean performance, they learned from each other, while maintaining a high level of exploration. Solutions improved most on rounds with social influence after a period of separation.
Benefits of hybrid working
The findings from this research can be directly extrapolated to hybrid working. When people have intermittent ties to one another, they are more likely to maximise their ability to integrate diverse information and perspectives to solve complex and uncertain problems by benefitting from collective learning while minimising the negative impact of a premature convergence on ideas due to social influence.
Research such as this demonstrates tangible benefits of individuals having time to work alone as well as time to work collectively as a group, something which a hybrid working can physically assist with.
You can access the full research paper here.
