Group discussions are essential for organizing every aspect of modern life, from faculty meetings to senate debates, from grant review panels to papal conclaves. While costly in terms of time and organization effort, group discussions are commonly seen as a way of reaching better decisions compared to solutions that do not require coordination between the individuals (e.g. voting)---through discussion, the sum becomes greater than the parts. However, this assumption is not irrefutable: anecdotal evidence of wasteful discussions abounds, and in our own experiments we find that over 30 of discussions are unproductive. We propose a framework for analyzing conversational dynamics in order to determine whether a given task-oriented discussion is worth having or not. We exploit conversational patterns reflecting the flow of ideas and the balance between the participants, as well as their linguistic choices. We apply this framework to conversations naturally occurring in an online collaborative world exploration game developed and deployed to support this research. Using this setting, we show that linguistic cues and conversational patterns extracted from the first 20 seconds of a team discussion are predictive of whether it will be a wasteful or a productive one.
Research on success in groups with more than two members is less common. model the grades of 27 group assignments from a class using measures of average entrainment, finding task-specific words to be a strong cue. shows how the affective balance expressed in correlates with performance on engineering tasks, in 30 teams of up to 4 students. In a related study the balance in the first 5 minutes of an interaction is found predictive of performance @cite_21 . None of the research we are aware of controls for initial skill or potential of the members.
@cite_21
1995708924
Inspired by research on the role of affect in marital interactions, the authors examined whether affective interaction dynamics occurring within a 5-minute slice can predict pair programming performance. In a laboratory experiment with professional programmers, Group Hedonic Balance, a measure of the balance between positive and negative expressed affect, accounted for up to 35 of the variance in not only subjective but also objective pair programming performance. Implications include a new set of methods to study pair programming interactions and recommendations to improve pair programming performance.