Doctoral Dissertation Research: Collective Cognition and Group Performance

标题：集体认知和集体表现国家科学基金会摘要新产品和服务的创造、重大公共政策问题的解决方案、科学发现和艺术成就都是小团队和组织开展工作的结果。然而，强大的团队表现的决定因素还没有被很好地理解。缺乏理解的部分原因是，重要的变量，如团队所说语言的结构和社交互动的动态性质，尚未得到彻底调查。这个项目将分析团队所说的语言如何影响他们的社交互动，并将追踪这些互动模式如何影响团队绩效。利用语言学、认知论和信息论，该项目将增强我们对团队非凡创造力和决策的决定因素的知识。该项目将在三个方面直接影响社会。首先，具体地说，它将培训一名有大学抱负的第一代拉美裔高中生担任研究助理，为他或她进行大学水平的研究做好准备。其次，它将提供更好的组织团队和组织的方法，并将为创建更好和更有效率的团队创造新的工具。最后，它将为大约700种语言创造一种新的语言复杂性衡量标准，其他学者将能够在他们自己的研究中使用。长期研究的语言相对论认为，一个人的语言结构影响他或她的认知。虽然这一假设只在语言如何影响个体认知的背景下被追寻，但本文将这一论点扩展到社会学领域，超越了个体，提出以下问题：1)语言结构的差异是否会影响群体的表现？如果是这样的话，2)这种表现差异的原因是什么？这个项目对世界语言中包含的平均歧义率进行了新的估计。它认为，由于类比推理过程是人类认知的基础，使用高度歧义语言的团队会参与社交互动模式，这会导致某些类型的团队任务的表现更高，而另一些任务的表现更低。这项研究将丰富社会学对团队绩效的理解，到目前为止，团队绩效的社会学理解主要集中在网络结构如何影响团队内部和团队之间的信任和信息流，而尚未关注所使用的沟通协议的结构。通过使用计算、档案和实验方法，该项目将跟踪语言歧义如何影响社交互动的性质以及信息通过这些互动流动的方式，从而影响团队绩效的总体比率。

Title: Collective Cognition and Group PerformanceNSF AbstractThe creation of new products and services, solutions to important public policy problems, scientific discovery, and artistic accomplishments are all the outcome of work carried out by small teams and organizations. The determinants of strong team performance, however, are not well understood. Part of the reason for this lack of understanding is that important variables, such as the structure of the language that a team speaks and the dynamic nature of social interactions, have yet to be thoroughly investigated. This project will analyze how the language spoken by teams affects how they socially interact and will trace how these patterns of interaction affect team performance. Drawing on linguistic, cognitive, and information theory, the project will enhance our knowledge of the determinants of exceptional team creativity and decision-making. The project will directly impact society in three ways. First, and concretely, it will train one college-aspiring, first-generation, Hispanic high school student as a research assistant to prepare him or her for college-level research. Second, it will inform better ways of organizing teams and organizations and will create new tools for the creation of better and more efficient teams. Finally, it will create a new measure of language complexity for approximately 700 languages, which other scholars will be able to use in their own research.The long-researched linguistic relativity hypothesis argues that the structure of a person's language influences his or her cognition. While this hypothesis has only been pursued in the context of how language affects individual cognition, this dissertation extends the argument into sociological territory by moving beyond the individual, asking: 1) Can differences in language structure affect the performance of groups? And, if so, 2) what accounts for this performance difference? This project creates novel estimates of the average rate of ambiguity contained within the world's languages. It argues that due to the analogical reasoning process that underlies much of human cognition, teams speaking high ambiguity languages will engage in social interaction patterns that lead to higher rates of performance for some kinds of team tasks and lower rates of performance for others. This study will enrich the sociological understanding of team performance, which has heretofore focused on the manner in which network structures influence trust and information flow within and between groups, but has yet to focus on the structure of the communication protocols used. By using computational, archival, and experimental methodology, the project will trace how language ambiguity can affect the nature of social interactions as well as the manner in which information flows through those interactions, thereby affecting overall rates of team performance.