As is often the case, I write a blog on a topic I’m not currently exploring in my research only to discover that I’m about to delve into the depths of that exact topic for an academic article or presentation.<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, I confessed that I had not maintained an active awareness of research on cognitive empathy<\/a> and business communications. Much business scholarship on empathy studies “normal” (statistically representative and generalizable) groups. Seldom do I stumble upon detailed discussion of autistic traits in the workplace and the challenges those present. Those discussions more frequently appear in psychology journals or publications with a narrow focus on autism.<\/p>\n Having acknowledged my lack of awareness, being steeped in the rhetoric of economics for a potential book project, today I stumbled right back into autism while preparing for an academic presentation.<\/p>\n My Carnegie Mellon University colleague\u00a0Anita Woolley, along withThomas W.\u00a0Malone (MIT) and Christopher Chabris (Union College), has been studying cognitive empathy and Theory of Mind<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>(ToM), publishing excellent scholarship that directly addresses how autistic traits negatively affect collaborative teams.<\/p>\n Recently, Woolley and her collaborators published a paper revealing that successful online teams reflect the same high levels of cognitive empathy and ToM awareness that face-to-face teams demonstrate. For an autistic worker, this could explain workplace experiences and identifies a challenge we must address, somehow.<\/p>\n Why Some Teams are Smarter than Others<\/p>\n http:\/\/mobile.nytimes.com\/2015\/01\/18\/opinion\/sunday\/why-some-teams-are-smarter-than-others.html<\/a><\/p>\n In a new\u00a0study\u00a0that we published with David Engel and Lisa X. Jing of M.I.T. last\u00a0month in PLoS One, we\u00a0replicated these earlier findings, but with a twist. We\u00a0randomly assigned each of 68 teams to complete\u00a0our collective intelligence test in\u00a0one of two conditions. Half of the teams worked face to face, like the\u00a0teams in our\u00a0earlier studies. The other half worked online, with no ability to see any of their\u00a0teammates.\u00a0Online collaboration is on the rise, with tools like Skype, Google Drive\u00a0and old-fashioned email enabling\u00a0groups that never meet to execute complex\u00a0projects. We wanted to see whether groups that worked\u00a0online would still\u00a0demonstrate collective intelligence, and whether social ability would matter as\u00a0much\u00a0when people communicated purely by typing messages into a browser.<\/p>\n And they did. Online and off, some teams consistently worked smarter than others.\u00a0More surprisingly,\u00a0the most important ingredients for a smart team remained\u00a0constant regardless of its mode of interaction:\u00a0members who communicated a lot,\u00a0participated equally and possessed good emotion-reading skills.<\/p>\n This last finding was another surprise. Emotion-reading mattered just as much for\u00a0the online teams\u00a0whose members could not see one another as for the teams that\u00a0worked face to face<\/strong><\/em>. What makes teams\u00a0smart must be not just the ability to read\u00a0facial expressions, but a more general ability, known as “Theory\u00a0of Mind,” to\u00a0consider and keep track of what other people feel, know and believe.<\/p>\n A new science of effective teamwork is vital not only because teams do so many\u00a0important things in\u00a0society, but also because so many teams operate over long periods of time, confronting an ever-widening array of tasks and problems that\u00a0may be much different\u00a0from the ones they were initially convened to solve. General\u00a0intelligence, whether in individuals or teams,\u00a0is especially crucial for explaining\u00a0who will do best in novel situations or ones that require learning and\u00a0adaptation to\u00a0changing circumstances. We hope that understanding what makes groups smart\u00a0will help\u00a0organizations and leaders in all fields create and manage teams more\u00a0effectively.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Findings that explain why autistics struggle in collaborative environments help us defend the need for research on ways to address these challenges. Until we prove there is a problem, we cannot research how to address that problem. That’s the nature of academic research. Now, thanks to Woolley and her collaborators, we can bridge the Theory of Mind research among autism scholars with the research of business communication scholars. If organizational behavior research indicates success at work correlates to ToM and cognitive empathy, I see openings for research proposals that seek ways to mitigate the effects of autistic impairments in the workplace<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Autism is defined by social impairments. Assuming we accept the APA DSM5 criteria and the standard assessment instruments, the same traits that reduce team effectiveness define the autistic experience.<\/p>\n Forgive the non-APA citations:<\/p>\n Reading the Mind in the Eyes or Reading between the Lines? Theory of\u00a0Mind Predicts Collective Intelligence<\/a> Equally Well Online and Face-To-Face Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups. [http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/content\/330\/6004\/686.full<\/a>] As is often the case, I write a blog on a topic I’m not currently exploring in my research only to discover that I’m about to delve into the depths of that exact topic for an academic article or presentation. A few weeks ago, I confessed that I had not…<\/p>\n
\n[http:\/\/journals.plos.org\/plosone\/article?id=10.1371\/journal.pone.0115212<\/a>]
\nDavid Engel, Anita Williams Woolley, Lisa X. Jing, Christopher F. Chabris, and Thomas W. Malone
\nPublished: December 16, 2014. [DOI: 10.1371\/journal.pone.0115212]<\/p>\n
\nAnita Williams Woolley, Christopher F. Chabris, Alex Pentland, Nada Hashmi, and\u00a0Thomas W. Malone.
\nScience\u00a029 October 2010:\u00a0330\u00a0(6004),\u00a0686-688.
\nPublished:\u00a030 September 2010\u00a0[DOI:10.1126\/science.1193147]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"