Task complexity moderates group synergy
Almaatouq and colleagues studied how the difficulty of a task changes whether a group does better than the individuals in it. In a preregistered experiment in two phases, participants first worked on tasks of varying complexity and were then randomly assigned to solve similar tasks either in interacting groups or alone. On complex tasks, groups matched the speed of the fastest individual and beat the most efficient individual, but they did not show that advantage on simple tasks. Detailed digital records let the authors measure the process losses and synergistic gains involved, and the balance between the two reverses at intermediate levels of complexity. The authors report that groups produced more solutions faster and searched the solution space more widely.
Almaatouq and colleagues studied how the difficulty of a task changes whether a group does better than the individuals in it. In a preregistered experiment in two phases, participants first worked on tasks of varying complexity and were then randomly assigned to solve similar tasks either in interacting groups or alone. On complex tasks, groups matched the speed of the fastest individual and beat the most efficient individual, but they did not show that advantage on simple tasks. Detailed digital records let the authors measure the process losses and synergistic gains involved, and the balance between the two reverses at intermediate levels of complexity. The authors report that groups produced more solutions faster and searched the solution space more widely.
Written from the abstract, Europe PMC record.
What our sources record
Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
Almaatouq, A., Alsobay, M., Yin, M., & Watts, D. J. (2021). Task complexity moderates group synergy. PNAS, 118(36). doi:10.1073/pnas.2101062118