Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America.
Department of Communication, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2021 Mar 18;16(3):e0247655. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0247655. eCollection 2021.
Collective intelligence (CI) is the ability of a group to solve a wide range of problems. Synchrony in nonverbal cues is critically important to the development of CI; however, extant findings are mostly based on studies conducted face-to-face. Given how much collaboration takes place via the internet, does nonverbal synchrony still matter and can it be achieved when collaborators are physically separated? Here, we hypothesize and test the effect of nonverbal synchrony on CI that develops through visual and audio cues in physically-separated teammates. We show that, contrary to popular belief, the presence of visual cues surprisingly has no effect on CI; furthermore, teams without visual cues are more successful in synchronizing their vocal cues and speaking turns, and when they do so, they have higher CI. Our findings show that nonverbal synchrony is important in distributed collaboration and call into question the necessity of video support.
集体智慧（CI）是一个群体解决各种问题的能力。非言语线索的同步对于 CI 的发展至关重要；然而，现有研究大多基于面对面的研究。考虑到互联网上有多少协作是通过网络进行的，非言语同步是否仍然重要，当协作人员身体分离时，它是否可以实现？在这里，我们假设并测试了通过身体分离的队友的视觉和音频线索发展的非言语同步对 CI 的影响。我们表明，与普遍的看法相反，视觉线索的存在出人意料地对 CI 没有影响；此外，没有视觉线索的团队在协调他们的声音线索和说话轮次方面更加成功，当他们这样做时，他们的 CI 更高。我们的研究结果表明，非言语同步在分布式协作中很重要，并对视频支持的必要性提出了质疑。
