A quick thread on our new paper at PNAS: pnas.org/content/early/…
"How intermittent breaks in interaction improve collective intelligence"
w/ @ethanbernstein & @davidlazer
"How intermittent breaks in interaction improve collective intelligence"
w/ @ethanbernstein & @davidlazer
Prior research on collective intelligence implies a tradeoff between individual exploration and learning from peers: when you do one, you can't do the other as well.
When people explore on their own, the quality of the average solution is low but the quality of the best solution is high.
When people influence each other, it's the other way around: the quality of the average solution is high but the quality of the best solution is not as good.
But our experiment shows that when people interact intermittently (as opposed to constantly or not at all as in previous work), they explore on their own AND learn from each other.
This is good news, because intermittent interaction is common in the real world.
But communication apps and social networking tools can push us away from intermittent interaction toward constant interaction.
Our work suggests this would increase the number of pretty good ideas, but decrease the number of truly great ideas we generate collectively
... which doesn't sound like good news for creative teams, firms, or communities.
To conclude:, a question: how could communication technologies be designed to encourage intermittent -- rather than constant -- interaction?
