爲什麼有些團隊比其他團隊聰明

ENDLESS meetings that do little but waste everyone’s time. Dysfunctional committees that take two steps back for every one forward. Project teams that engage in wishful groupthinking rather than honest analysis. Everyone who is part of an organization — a company, a nonprofit, a condo board — has experienced these and other pathologies that can occur when human beings try to work together in groups.

無窮無盡的會議幾乎毫無用處，只是浪費每個人的時間。功能失調的委員會每前進一步就倒退兩步。項目組總是進行想當然的小組思考，而非誠實的分析。只要你屬於某個組織——公司、非營利組織、業主委員會——都會遇到類似的問題，這些問題在人類共事時經常出現。

But does teamwork have to be a lost cause? Psychologists have been working on the problem for a long time. And for good reason: Nowadays, though we may still idolize the charismatic leader or creative genius, almost every decision of consequence is made by a group. When Facebook’s board of directors establishes a privacy policy, when the C.I.A.’s operatives strike a suspected terrorist hide-out or when a jury decides whether to convict a defendant, what matters is not just the intelligence and wisdom of the individual actors involved. Groups of smart people can make horrible decisions — or great ones.

但是團隊合作一定是徒勞無功的嗎？心理學家們已經研究這個問題很長時間了。他們的研究很有必要：如今，雖然我們可能仍然崇拜有魅力的領導或創意天才，但是幾乎每個重要決定都是團隊做出的。當Facebook的董事會制定一個隱私政策時，當美國中央情報局的特工們襲擊一個可疑的恐怖分子藏身處時，或者當陪審團決定被告是否有罪時，重要的不是單個參與者的聰明才智。一羣聰明的人可能會做出糟糕的決定，也可能做出偉大的決定。

Psychologists have known for a century that individuals vary in their cognitive ability. But are some groups, like some people, reliably smarter than others?

心理學家們一百年前已經知道，人們的認知能力各不相同。但是團隊是否也像人一樣，聰明程度有所不同？

Working with several colleagues and students, we set out to answer that question. In our first two studies, which we published with Alex Pentland and Nada Hashmi of M.I.T. in 2010 in the journal Science, we grouped 697 volunteer participants into teams of two to five members. Each team worked together to complete a series of short tasks, which were selected to represent the varied kinds of problems that groups are called upon to solve in the real world. One task involved logical analysis, another brainstorming; others emphasized coordination, planning and moral reasoning.

我們幾個同事、學生開始尋找這個問題的答案。我們的前兩項研究是和麻省理工學院的亞歷克斯·彭特蘭(Alex Pentland)、娜達·哈什米(Nada Hashmi)合作進行的，2010年發表在《科學》(Science)雜誌上。我們召集了697名志願者，分成二至五人的團隊。每個團隊協力完成一系列小任務，這些精選出來的任務代表了現實生活中組建團隊通常想解決的各種問題。有些任務需要邏輯分析或頭腦風暴；有些則強調協調、計劃和道德說服。

Individual intelligence, as psychologists measure it, is defined by its generality: People with good vocabularies, for instance, also tend to have good math skills, even though we often think of those abilities as distinct. The results of our studies showed that this same kind of general intelligence also exists for teams. On average, the groups that did well on one task did well on the others, too. In other words, some teams were simply smarter than others.

心理學家們經過測試發現，個人智力具有普遍性：比如，詞彙量豐富的人往往計算能力也強，雖然我們通常認爲這些能力沒有關係。我們的研究結果表明，團隊也具有這種普遍智力。平均說來，那些在某項任務上做得好的團隊其他任務也完成得比較好。換句話說，有些團隊就是比其他團隊聰明。

We next tried to define what characteristics distinguished the smarter teams from the rest, and we were a bit surprised by the answers we got. We gave each volunteer an individual I.Q. test, but teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on our collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group’s success.

然後，我們想找出聰明團隊具有哪些特點，答案有點出乎我們的意料。我們單獨測試了每個志願者的智商，發現平均智商較高的團隊在集體智力任務中的得分並不比平均智商較低的團隊高。成員更外向、或者更願意爲團隊成功做出積極貢獻的團隊也沒有表現得更出色。

Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.

相反，最聰明的團隊具有以下三個特點。

First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.

第一，團隊成員在小組討論中的貢獻比較均衡，而不是讓一兩個人主導團隊。

Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.

第二，聰明團隊的成員在一項名爲“通過眼神讀心”的測試中得分較高，這項測試測量的是僅通過眼神解讀複雜情緒狀態的能力。

Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.

最後一點，女人多的團隊表現得比男人多的團隊好。“多樣性”（男女人數相當）對團隊智慧無關緊要，只要女人多就行。不過，最後這個特點的部分原因是女人總體來說比男人更善於“讀心”。

In a new study that we published with David Engel and Lisa X. Jing of M.I.T. last month in PLoS One, we replicated these earlier findings, but with a twist. We randomly assigned each of 68 teams to complete our collective intelligence test in one of two conditions. Half of the teams worked face to face, like the teams in our earlier studies. The other half worked online, with no ability to see any of their teammates. Online collaboration is on the rise, with tools like Skype, Google Drive and old-fashioned email enabling groups that never meet to execute complex projects. We wanted to see whether groups that worked online would still demonstrate collective intelligence, and whether social ability would matter as much when people communicated purely by typing messages into a browser.

我們和麻省理工學院的大衛·恩格爾(David Engel)、麗莎·X·徵(Lisa X. Jing)進行了一項新研究，該研究上月發表在《公共科學圖書館期刊》(PLoS One)上。我們再次驗證了之前的研究結果，同時有了一個新發現。我們隨機安排68個團隊在兩種不同條件下完成集體智慧測試。其中一半面對面交流，之前的研究都是這樣進行的。另一半通過網絡交流，看不到其他隊友。如今，網絡協作越來越多，因爲Skype、谷歌硬盤和傳統電子郵件等溝通工具讓從未謀面的團隊也能執行復雜項目。我們想看看通過網絡協作的團隊是否仍表現出集體智慧，當人們完全通過往瀏覽器上輸入信息進行交流時，社交能力是否還那麼重要。

And they did. Online and off, some teams consistently worked smarter than others. More surprisingly, the most important ingredients for a smart team remained constant regardless of its mode of interaction: members who communicated a lot, participated equally and possessed good emotion-reading skills.

結果發現，依然如此。不管是網絡交流還是面對面交流，有些團隊總是比其他團隊聰明。更令人意外的是，不管採取哪種交流方式，聰明團隊最重要的特點仍是這些：充分交流，平等參與，讀心能力強。

This last finding was another surprise. Emotion-reading mattered just as much for the online teams whose members could not see one another as for the teams that worked face to face. What makes teams smart must be not just the ability to read facial expressions, but a more general ability, known as “Theory of Mind,” to consider and keep track of what other people feel, know and believe.

最後這一點是另一個出人意料之處。對通過網絡交流的團隊來說，讀心能力也同樣重要。聰明團隊的成員不僅具有解讀面部表情的能力，還具有一種名爲“心智理論”(Theory of Mind)的更普遍的能力，它包括考慮和了解他人的感受和所知所信的能力。

A new science of effective teamwork is vital not only because teams do so many important things in society, but also because so many teams operate over long periods of time, confronting an ever-widening array of tasks and problems that may be much different from the ones they were initially convened to solve. General intelligence, whether in individuals or teams, is especially crucial for explaining who will do best in novel situations or ones that require learning and adaptation to changing circumstances. We hope that understanding what makes groups smart will help organizations and leaders in all fields create and manage teams more effectively.

關於有效團隊協作的新科學很重要，不僅是因爲社會中的很多重要工作都是團隊協作完成的，而且因爲很多團隊要一起協作很長時間，任務和問題會變得越來越多樣化，最後可能與團隊最初聚在一起想要解決的問題非常不同。普遍智力，不管是個人的還是團隊的，對於解釋誰會在新環境或者需要學習和適應的不斷變化的環境中表現得最好至關重要。我們希望，瞭解聰明團隊的特點能幫助各個領域的組織和領導者更有效地創建和管理團隊。