Susannah B. F. Paletz

A Social-Cognitive Framework of Multidisciplinary Team Innovation

The psychology of science typically lacks integration between cognitive and social variables. We present a new framework of team innovation in multidisciplinary science and engineering groups that ties factors from both literatures together. We focus on the effects of a particularly challenging social factor, knowledge diversity, which has a history of mixed effects on creativity, most likely because those effects are mediated and moderated by cognitive and additional social variables. In addition, we highlight the distinction between team innovative processes that are primarily divergent versus convergent; we propose that the social and cognitive implications are different for each, providing a possible explanation for knowledge diversitys mixed results on team outcomes. Social variables mapped out include formal roles, communication norms, sufficient participation and information sharing, and task conflict; cognitive variables include analogy, information search, and evaluation. This framework provides a roadmap for research that aims to harness the power of multidisciplinary teams.

Analogy as a strategy for supporting complex problem solving under uncertainty

Complex problem solving in naturalistic environments is fraught with uncertainty, which has significant impacts on problem-solving behavior. Thus, theories of human problem solving should include accounts of the cognitive strategies people bring to bear to deal with uncertainty during problem solving. In this article, we present evidence that analogy is one such strategy. Using statistical analyses of the temporal dynamics between analogy and expressed uncertainty in the naturalistic problem-solving conversations among scientists on the Mars Rover Mission, we show that spikes in expressed uncertainty reliably predict analogy use (Study 1) and that expressed uncertainty reduces to baseline levels following analogy use (Study 2). In addition, in Study 3, we show with qualitative analyses that this relationship between uncertainty and analogy is not due to miscommunication-related uncertainty but, rather, is primarily concentrated on substantive problem-solving issues. Finally, we discuss a hypothesis about how analogy might serve as an uncertainty reduction strategy in naturalistic complex problem solving.

The interplay of conflict and analogy in multidisciplinary teams.

Creative teamwork in multidisciplinary teams is a topic of interest to cognitive psychologists on the one hand, and to both social and organizational psychologists on the other. However, the interconnections between cognitive and social layers have been rarely explored. Drawing on mental models and dissonance theories, the current study takes a central variable studied by cognitive psychologists-analogy-and examines its relationship to a central variable examined by social psychologists-conflict. In an observational, field study, over 11h of audio-video data from conversations of the Mars Exploration Rover scientists were coded for different types of analogy and micro-conflicts that reveal the character of underlying psychological mechanisms. Two different types of time-lagged logistic models applied to these data revealed asymmetric patterns of associations between analogy and conflict. Within-domain analogies, but not within-discipline or outside-discipline analogies, preceded science and work process conflicts, suggesting that in multidisciplinary teams, representational gaps in very close domains will be more likely to spark conflict. But analogies also occurred in reaction to conflict: Process and negative conflicts, but not task conflicts, preceded within-discipline analogies, but not to within-domain or outside-discipline analogies. This study demonstrates ways in which cognition can be bidirectionally tied to social processes and discourse.

Lexical entrainment and success in student engineering groups

Lexical entrainment is a measure of how the words that speakers use in a conversation become more similar over time. In this paper, we propose a measure of lexical entrainment for multi-party speaking situations. We apply this score to a corpus of student engineering groups using high-frequency words and project words, and investigate the relationship between lexical entrainment and group success on a class project. Our initial findings show that, using the entrainment score with project-related words, there is a significant difference between the lexical entrainment of high performing groups, which tended to increase with time, and the entrainment for low performing groups, which tended to decrease with time.

In the World or in the Head: External and Internal Implicit Theories of Creativity

This research is an initial step to bringing existing research on cultural differences in attribution and holism to the study of implicit theories of creativity. Two studies examined the tendency to consider creativity to be prototypically expressed internally via reflection and internal states versus expressed externally via interaction and products. Study 1 had Caucasian American, Asian American, and Japanese undergraduates list activities and traits they associated with creative groups and individuals. In Study 2, Japanese, Chinese, Caucasian Americans, and Asian Americans chose specific professions as more creative using a paired forced-choice method. In both studies, East Asians had a greater propensity to choose external traits, activities, and professions as creative, whereas Caucasian Americans and to a lesser degree, Asian Americans showed a preference for internal items. The implications of cross-cultural differences in implicit theories of creativity are discussed.

Project Management of Innovative Teams

Publisher Summary This chapter intends to outline fundamental project management concepts, and then to tie these to relevant psychological and organizational research. In many organizations, innovation occurs in teams working within project management structures. A design team working internally to NASA was tasked with producing software to support the reporting, tracking, and correcting problems with space flight hardware. As with most large organizations, NASA required project management principles be met. Although this software design was conducted in a flexible, fast-paced, and iterative manner, clear requirements, schedules, and risks were identified and managed for the life of the project. Creativity is generally defined as a person, process, product, or environment that expresses or enables both usefulness (appropriateness or correctness) and originality/novelty. Innovation additionally includes the elements of relative rather than absolute novelty, intentional benefit to an individual, group, organization, or to wider society, and the application or implementation of the creative idea. Although there is academic research on project management, it is primarily a form of structuring work processes. Projects have real outcomes and meaningful consequences. As such, project management is simultaneously an area of research, an application, a type of practice, and a method of conducting work.

Multidisciplinary Teamwork and Big Data

In this presentation, I discuss four constructs vital to successful multidisciplinary teamwork: shared mental models, communicating unique information, conflict, and analogy. I highlight the literature and provide lessons learned for each.

The Teams Corpus and Entrainment in Multi-Party Spoken Dialogues

When interacting individuals entrain, they begin to speak more like each other. To support research on entrainment in cooperative multi-party dialogues, we have created a corpus where teams of three or four speakers play two rounds of a cooperative board game. We describe the experimental design and technical infrastructure used to collect our corpus, which consists of audio, video, transcriptions, and questionnaire data for 63 teams (47 hours of audio). We illustrate the use of our corpus as a novel resource for studying team entrainment by 1) developing and evaluating teamlevel acoustic-prosodic entrainment measures that extend existing dyad measures, and 2) investigating relationships between team entrainment and participation dominance.

Chapter 3: Psychological Factors Surrounding Disagreement in Multicultural Design Team Meetings

© 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, London, UK. Design team problem-solving is challenging to study because the strategies and behaviours exhibited by teams can vary considerably with team composition, design environment and task demands. As a consequence, the tools and methods developed to improve team strategies and behaviours are not always empirically informed. Existing work on team problem-solving tends to adopt one of two perspectives. The first relates to design cognition and focuses on how the team represents and tackles the problem. The second relates to teamwork and focuses on how the composition, structure and dynamics of the team affect the way it works together. In this study, we adopt both these perspectives when analysing the dialogue and behaviours of a professional design team in meetings over the course of a project. Content analysis of team members’ verbal communications (with pre-defined codes) is used to characterise the team’s problemsolving strategy while qualitative observations (without pre-defined codes) are used to characterise team dynamics, integration and effectiveness during different problemsolving episodes. Our findings suggest that leadership can play an important role in design problem-solving. The team leader shapes the team’s problem-solving strategy by coordinating team discussions and helps the team to build up shared representations by facilitating closed-loop communication. These findings suggest that good leadership practices – and the team processes that they facilitate – are important in small task-driven teams and not only in larger team units such as organisations.

Using Structural Topic Modeling to Detect Events and Cluster Twitter Users in the Ukrainian Crisis

Structural topic modeling (STM) is a recently introduced technique to model how the content of a collection of documents changes as a function of variables such as author identity or time of writing. We present two proof-of-concept applications of STM using Russian social media data. In our first study, we model how topics change over time, showing that STM can be used to detect significant events such as the downing of Malaysia Air Flight 17. In our second study, we model how topical content varies across a set of authors, showing that STM can be used to cluster Twitter users who are sympathetic to Ukraine versus Russia as well as to cluster accounts that are suspected to belong to the same individual (so-called “sockpuppets”). Structural topic modeling shows promise as a tool for analyzing social media data, a domain that has been largely ignored in the topic modeling literature.