Doctoral Dissertation Research: Collective Cognition and Group Performance

摘要新产品和新服务的创造、重大公共政策问题的解决、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，强大团队绩效的决定因素尚未得到很好的理解。这种缺乏理解的部分原因是，重要的变量，如团队使用的语言结构和社会互动的动态性质，尚未得到彻底的调查。这个项目将分析团队使用的语言如何影响他们的社会互动，并将追踪这些互动模式如何影响团队绩效。利用语言学、认知和信息理论，该项目将增强我们对卓越团队创造力和决策决定因素的认识。该项目将在三个方面对社会产生直接影响。首先，具体地说，它将培养一名渴望上大学的第一代西班牙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，它将为组织团队和组织提供更好的方法，并为创建更好、更高效的团队创造新的工具。最后，它将为大约700种语言创建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假设认为，一个人的语言结构影响他或她的认知。虽然这一假设只是在语言如何影响个人认知的背景下进行的，但本文将这一论点扩展到社会学领域，超越了个人，提出了以下问题：1)语言结构的差异是否会影响群体的表现？如果是的话，2)是什么造成了这种性能差异？这个项目对世界语言中包含的平均歧义率进行了新颖的估计。它认为，由于类比推理过程是人类认知的基础，使用高度模糊性语言的团队将参与社会互动模式，从而导致某些团队任务的高绩效，而其他团队任务的低绩效。这项研究将丰富对团队绩效的社会学理解，迄今为止，这一理解主要集中在网络结构影响团队内部和团队之间信任和信息流的方式上，但尚未关注所使用的通信协议的结构。通过使用计算、档案和实验方法，该项目将追踪语言歧义如何影响社会互动的本质，以及信息在这些互动中流动的方式，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.