Doctoral Dissertation Research: Collective Cognition and Group Performance

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Title: Collective Cognition and Group Performance NSF Abstract The creation of new products and services, solutions to important public policy problems, scientific discovery, and artistic accomplishments are all the outcome of work carried out by small teams and organizations. The determinants of strong team performance, however, are not well understood. Part of the reason for this lack of understanding is that important variables, such as the structure of the language that a team speaks and the dynamic nature of social interactions, have yet to be thoroughly investigated. This project will analyze how the language spoken by teams affects how they socially interact and will trace how these patterns of interaction affect team performance. Drawing on linguistic, cognitive, and information theory, the project will enhance our knowledge of the determinants of exceptional team creativity and decision-making. The project will directly impact society in three ways. First, and concretely, it will train one college-aspiring, first-generation, Hispanic high school student as a research assistant to prepare him or her for college-level research. Second, it will inform better ways of organizing teams and organizations and will create new tools for the creation of better and more efficient teams. Finally, it will create a new measure of language complexity for approximately 700 languages, which other scholars will be able to use in their own research. The long-researched linguistic relativity hypothesis argues that the structure of a person's language influences his or her cognition. While this hypothesis has only been pursued in the context of how language affects individual cognition, this dissertation extends the argument into sociological territory by moving beyond the individual, asking: 1) Can differences in language structure affect the performance of groups? And, if so, 2) what accounts for this performance difference? This project creates novel estimates of the average rate of ambiguity contained within the world's languages. It argues that due to the analogical reasoning process that underlies much of human cognition, teams speaking high ambiguity languages will engage in social interaction patterns that lead to higher rates of performance for some kinds of team tasks and lower rates of performance for others. This study will enrich the sociological understanding of team performance, which has heretofore focused on the manner in which network structures influence trust and information flow within and between groups, but has yet to focus on the structure of the communication protocols used. By using computational, archival, and experimental methodology, the project will trace how language ambiguity can affect the nature of social interactions as well as the manner in which information flows through those interactions, thereby affecting overall rates of team performance.