Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2018 Jun;147(6):939-944. doi: 10.1037/xge0000456.
Contrary to the popular belief that collaboration brings better problem solutions, empirical studies have revealed that interacting groups often performed worse than noninteracting "nominal" groups. Past studies mainly examined how overhearing others' ideas impacts group performance. This study investigated the impact of another essential but overlooked group communicative process-verbalizing ideas to others-on group performance. Participants (N = 156) solved 20 verbal puzzles either alone quietly, alone thinking-aloud, or in verbalizing pairs. Participants in the same working-alone condition were randomly paired to form nominal pairs and their pooled performance was treated as nominal group performance. Relative to the quiet nominal group, the performance of the thinking-aloud nominal and interacting groups were impaired to similar extents. These two groups also demonstrated a similar limited capacity to expand the search scope. The equivalency of the interacting and thinking-aloud nominal group results suggest that verbalization is a key factor in groups' inferior performance. (PsycINFO Database Record
与合作带来更好问题解决方案的普遍观点相反，实证研究表明，互动小组的表现往往不如非互动的“名义”小组。过去的研究主要考察了偷听他人想法如何影响小组的表现。本研究调查了另一个重要但被忽视的小组交流过程——向他人表达想法——对小组表现的影响。参与者（N=156）单独安静地、单独出声思考地或在出声对等地解决 20 个口头谜题。在相同的单独工作条件下，参与者被随机配对形成名义小组，他们的总表现被视为名义小组的表现。与安静的名义小组相比，出声思考的名义小组和互动小组的表现都受到了类似程度的损害。这两个小组也表现出了类似的有限扩大搜索范围的能力。互动小组和出声思考的名义小组的结果相当，这表明表达是小组表现不佳的一个关键因素。
