Vocal Turn-taking and the Emergence of Collective Intelligence in Human Teams

Based on my work on collective behavior and my motivation to combine this approach with studies of human behavior, I was awarded a Rice Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Rice University. This opportunity has enabled me to think broadly about the role communication plays in collective intelligence, decision-making and coordination while also expanding my understanding of the complexities of human social behavior.

Our work focuses not on what is being communicated, but rather on patterns of communication, such as the timing and directedness of speaking turns. We aim to connect these patterns to well-studied constructs in team studies (e.g. cohesion, voice, leadership) and relate them to team outcomes. Through inspiration from studies of animal swarm intelligence, I am developing new ways of linking individual traits, behavioral processes and group outcomes. In addition, I intend to bring knowledge back to the field of animal behavior to inspire new approaches.

I recently completed data collection for a study examining the relationship between individuals’ independent solutions to an online design challenge, the team’s subsequent patterns of discussion and the team’s final solution. Preliminary results indicate that the final solutions of teams performed significantly better than the final solutions of those who continued to work alone, despite no difference in the quality of their initial independent solutions. Current work is focused on determining the role skill, personality traits, and communication patterns play in facilitating this collective advantage. Our team aims to convert the knowledge we are gaining into applications for improving real-world teams.

Related Publications

O’Bryan LR, Oxendhal T, Chen X, McDuff D, Segarra S, Wettergreen M, Beier ME, Sabharwal A. (Under Review) Objective Communication Patterns Associated with Team Member Effectiveness in Real-world Virtual Teams.

O’Bryan LR, Segarra S, Paoletti J, Zajac, S, Beier M, Sabharwal A, Wettergreen M, Salas E. (Accepted) Conversational Turn-taking as a Stochastic Process on Networks. 56th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, 2022.

O’Bryan LR, Beier, M, Salas, E (2020) How approaches to animal swarm intelligence can improve the study of collective intelligence in human teams. Journal of Intelligence, 8, 1