Background A growing body of research has identified behavioral markers of collective intelligence to diagnose the quality of group collaboration in real time. Prior work suggests that real-time collaborative process metrics may be used not only to measure and predict the collective intelligence of a group, but also to improve team performance through targeted interventions. Purpose This research examines whether providing teams with real-time feedback on their collaborative process metrics improves performance and collective intelligence in a dynamic team task. Research Design We conducted two experiments in which teams collaborated on an online search and rescue task. Experimental conditions varied whether teams were exposed to real-time displays of their collaborative process metrics. Study Sample Participants were organized into teams and completed the task in an online experimental environment. Data Collection and/or Analysis We collected behavioral trace data capturing team interactions and computed real-time collaborative process metrics. Team performance and collective intelligence were analyzed across experimental conditions to assess the effects of feedback exposure. Results Contrary to expectations, real-time feedback did not uniformly improve collaboration quality or performance. In several instances, teams over-corrected their behavior in response to feedback on a single dimension, which negatively impacted other dimensions of collaboration and reduced task performance. Conclusion These findings suggest that real-time digital nudges aimed at improving collaboration can produce unintended consequences. Caution is warranted when deploying process-level, real-time interventions, as optimizing one collaborative dimension may disrupt others and undermine collective intelligence.
McDonald et al. (Thu,) studied this question.