the neuroscience of teams: current projects

Overview

Scientists split the atom. The Beatles play on a rooftop in London. The Garcias win Family Feud. We live our lives in teams. They are the nexus of the accomplishments, failures, discord, and friendships that color modern life — a place where we consistently achieve beyond our individual capabilities while fulfilling both interpersonal and instrumental needs. For these reasons, psychology has long been interested in social behavior as it relates to team dynamics, with particular emphasis on the factors that facilitate collective success. However, the complex, adaptive, and dynamic nature of teams has made it difficult for researchers to study the underlying psychological mechanisms of real teams in real time. This limitation has forced team psychologists to make a tradeoff between realistic team social dynamics and the ability to assess in-the-moment cognitive processes.

My research agenda solves this tension by using multiple mobile, motion-tolerant neuroimaging devices, specifically functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), to study the neural and behavioral responses associated with real-time team dynamics, offering in-the-moment psychological assessment of teams without sacrificing naturalistic interaction. A new frontier, I believe this social neuroscientific approach can contribute to more than a century of research surrounding how to live and work harmoniously in the spaces where we spend so much of our lives — teams.

Cognitive Diversity

One of my current projects explores how cognitive diversity, or the diversity of perspectives and thinking styles that team members bring to the table, affects team dynamics in the movement and over time. Prior work suggests that it is advantageous for teams to comprise cognitively diverse members, particularly in contexts that demand innovation and creativity. Cognitive diversity in teams may be helpful for facilitating new ideas, avoiding groupthink, and maintaining flexibility in the face of organizational tensions. However, it has been difficult to operationalize and assess cognitive diversity in teams, with researchers often using personality and demographic variables as stand-ins for what they are really interested in — diverse responses within the team context itself.

Neural synchrony, or the coupling of different people’s neural fluctuations over time, may be a path to objectively measuring cognitive diversity in teams. Research shows that neural synchrony correlates with shared ways of experiencing and interpreting the world, and it is linked to many forms of interpersonal processes, such as communication, cooperation, and semantic processing. While neural synchrony alone may not be able to isolate exactly what someone is thinking or feeling, it can reveal the extent to which people are thinking or feeling similarly or differently from one another, with cognitively diverse viewpoints characterized by less neural synchrony. This framework may help us better understand how diversity, at the cognitive level, relates to team efficacy and cohesion, thus improving our knowledge about when, how, and why our individual differences can become our collective strengths. I intend for this research to help us more intentionally create, organize, and manage teams so that diversity begets efficacy, which in turn begets team cultures of fellowship, trust, and respect among people who think different.

Real-World Executives

In order to bring this research into the field with real-world people, the SCN lab went to Summit LA, which is an organizational festival that invites successful business executives to build community and discuss ideas together. We brought groups of three or four executives each into our pop-up lab and had them discuss ideas together while we scanned their brains with fNIRS. We found significant effects concerning how age and gender composition relate to a group’s ability to synchronize in the brain and understand one another. We also found that group-level perceptions of how engaging a discussion leader is correlated with that leader’s ability to synchronize the group, though leaders’ self-perceptions do not. Additionally, the varying social demands of this naturalistic experiment allowed me to delineate functional differences between areas of the social brain, finding more medial prefrontal cortex synchrony during active discussion and more temporal parietal junction synchrony when one person is talking and others are passively listening. I presented this research at the Society for fNIRS conference, and the first-authored manuscripts are being prepared for publication.

Neurofeedback

One of my developing project involves using brain measures to find new ways to improve social dynamics within teams. In the current state of the field, there remains a disconnect between the examination of a team's psychological mechanisms, the analysis of the data, and the implementation of real-time data-driven intervention strategies. Even if psychologists are able to study teams effectively, there exists a chasm between the research process and the constantly changing nature of the individuals, relationships, tasks, and contexts that comprise working teams. We may be able to use a form of neurofeedback – the process of relaying people’s neural activity back to them through some type of sensory signal – to translate real-time fNIRS recordings of teams into a format that team members can immediately consume and use to their benefit.

Whether the goal is cohesion and trust, better communication, or collective creativity, my current work of measuring neural synchrony in teams offers a framework for assessing and prescribing the level of cognitive diversity that is optimal for specific teams. Neurofeedback that relays the real-time levels of neural synchrony or diversity across team members’ brains can take this research a step further, providing socially meaningful signals that teams can use to recognize and change their in-the-moment dynamics to align with the team’s goals. For example, a feedback signal may alert a team of engineers that they are engaging in groupthink and should diverge their thinking, it can signal to a teacher when their students are not understanding certain concepts, and it can help a special-ops military team as they develop shared ways to communicate with each other during training.