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- [00:00]
A
The story of the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA is a pretty famous science story.
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It's a story you may know quite well. And if you do, you probably think the answer is Watson and Crick, James.
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Watson and Francis Crick, who were kind of a dynamic duo. It became a really popular story because Watson wrote a book about this discovery and it was an excellent, really entertaining book. It got turned into a movie, starred Jeff Goldblum playing Watson and it was quite popular for a long time.
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Any other dimensions?
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A
Not that I remember.
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Didn't you take notes? No, but there's a problem because this well known story might not be completely true.
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And in Watson's account, he tells the story of really getting the idea for the double helix structure because he was able to sneak a peek at what was called Photograph 51. We're just sitting there yelling out information like a speak your weight machine.
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All right, Jim, just, just be very cal. Tell me only what you're sure you saw.
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A
Double diamond pattern, empty in the middle helix.
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No doubt about that.
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A
There was a big reflection just here, 10th layer line. Definitely the 10th.
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B
That would give us a pitch of about 34 angstroms.
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A
And photograph 51 was developed by a different duo, including Rosalind Franklin, who is kind of the lead researcher on this. In his telling, he sort of tricked Franklin's supervisor into showing him Photograph 51. And then he saw it and realized what he said. This is the secret to life.
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Just tell me one more time you're sure about this.
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I'm sure. The double helix structure of our DNA, which kind of unlocked everything.
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It's a dramatic story. You can see how it became a movie, but it's false. And the real story actually teaches us much more about how small groups really function. It explains why sometimes we perform better in small groups and why occasionally we're far better off performing alone. All of that coming up in today's episode of Nudge. Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible, even with the best behavioural science. But that is exactly what Sandler training did with HubSpot. They use breeze, HubSpot's AI powered tools to tailor every customer interaction without the interaction sounding robotic or predictable. And the results were pretty incredible. Click through rates jumped by 25%, qualified leads quadrupled, and people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to HubSpot.com to see how Breez can help your business grow. Today on Nudge, I am joined by one of the world's leading experts on group dynamics.
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A
I'm Colin Fisher. I'M an associate professor of Organizations and Innovation at University College London School of Management, and I'm the author of the new book the Collective Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups.
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Colin looked into the double helix origin story for his book, and he found that the popular tale isn't completely accurate.
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The thing about that story is historians have found that it's really not true. And there are a couple of important points. The first important point is that Watson didn't really trick anyone into showing him this photograph that it was showed willingly, and that documents that have been uncovered since then show that there was a collaboration between four scientists who were working on this discovery of DNA, and they were all presenting it together, and all their names were on it as authors. And it was really only in retrospect, where Watson was kind of retelling a more dramatized version of this story, that he was able to come up with this, where he's the kind of clever hero of the story.
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But the real story reveals some very good insight into how humans actually behave in groups.
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A
Now, what this tells us about groups is a couple of really interesting things. The first is our tendency to want to ascribe authorship and credit to individuals. Our brains love narratives and stories. In those narratives and stories, the protagonist is almost always an individual. But not only is that not true in terms of establishing causality, especially for things like scientific discoveries, where when you dig underneath the surface, it's not just this lone genius who's toiling alone in the basement. It's almost always a team of people who need diverse expertise, information and perspectives to come together to solve really tricky problems.
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This was the case with the discovery of DNA. It wasn't just Watson and Crick. It was a team of four experts working together to solve the problem. But it's also true broadly of science. There is evidence that teams have a huge advantage over individuals in almost all STEM subjects. And Colin shared studies to prove it.
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So this article in Science is one of my favorites because what they did is they grabbed almost every patent, every scientific paper. And so they've got millions of data points where they could trace how many individual authored patents, inventions, scientific papers there were and kind of create a ratio of team products to individual products. And they could also kind of look across different disciplines.
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In total, they analyzed 19.8 million research articles and 2.1 million patents and found that those created by groups. Groups were more impactful than those created by individuals.
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There was such a clear trend that you almost don't need to do much of the data analysis to See this where team products were becoming more and more common over time, the size of those teams was growing. This trend held for basically every subject except for the arts and the humanities. So you see this trend in all scientific domains. You see it among inventors. By the end of their sample, teams were about six times more likely to come up with a breakthrough scientific discovery than were individuals working alone.
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Specifically, they found that a team authored paper was 6.3 times more likely than a solo authored paper to receive at least 1,000 citations. And yet this goes against the commonly held view that scientists perform better alone. It goes against the idea of these individual geniuses, the Einstein's Newtons, da Vinci's, making breakthroughs by intellectual rigor and their individual genius. Collins says this false worldview comes from a bias known as the fundamental attribution error.
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A
The fundamental attribution error, it's called fundamental because it really is at the base of how we make sense of the social world. And what the fundamental attribution error is are incorrect explanations of our own and others behaviors in terms of traits. So when somebody's late for a meeting, we assume it's because they're not very conscientious, they're flaky, they don't care. We don't think about the situational influences that might have caused that.
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We underestimate the situational factors behind all of our behavior. One 1973 study titled From Jerusalem to Jericho proves this very nicely. In the study, 40 trainee Catholic priests were asked to complete questionnaires explaining their reasons for becoming a priest. After they asked those same priests to record a five minute lecture for students about the virtues of helping others, the priests had to walk across the campus from the building they completed their questionnaire to the building, they would give the talk. That walk would take them about a minute. Just before they left, each priest was told how much time they had before the presentation. One third were told that they had plenty of time and there was no need to rush. Another third were told to please head over now as you're due to give your talk. And a final third were told, you're actually quite late, you better hurry. As the priests headed over, they each passed a stooge pretending to be an injured man in distress. He lay in a doorway, he coughed very loudly, he groaned. All of the priests would notice him, but but which would stop, you know, Remember these are priests about to give a lecture on the virtues of helping others. And each said they had the same reasons for signing up to be a priest. They wanted to make the World a better place. But the number who stopped was heavily dependent on the situational factor. See, only 10% of those who were told they were in a rush stopped, while 63% of those who were told they weren't in a hurry stops themselves. So our behavior, it isn't totally dependent on our personality, on our traits, on our values. More often than not, it is based on the situational factors we face.
- [09:22]
A
It turns out that this underweighting of context in situations includes groups. We don't do a good job of sort of registering groups as collections of individuals. And especially when those groups are more distant from ourselves, we kind of view them as this under differentiated mass of situation. And that leads us again to struggle to see them as causal agents. We don't see them as determining their fate as much as we see these kind of individual traits, you know, moxie and hard work and talent of people. And that again leads us to kind of misunderstand how good stuff is coming into the world. Good stuff like scientific discoveries and inventions and new businesses and. And so we end up with these biographies of great founders of businesses that really drill into the traits of the individual. And it's not that that's completely wrong, that there's some truth there, of course, but that we really underweight the influence that groups have on almost everything that's happening in the world.
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Our brains dismiss the effects of groups and exaggerate the impact of individuals, but that is not reality. And this obsession with individualism is increasing.
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Individualism and collectivism are these kind of like fundamental ways of talking about how much we value individual autonomy and sort of think of the self as being separate from other kinds of proximal identities. The self is separate from the family, from the community, from the nation, from the culture. And collectivism is a belief that those.
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Things are more intertwined and cultures are becoming more individualistic.
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Now, when you measure indications of individualism and collectivism, I was actually really surprised by this research. It wasn't stuff I was aware of before I started researching the book. We usually think countries like the US like the UK are quite individualistic countries and that some things about individualism are unique in these more individualistic countries as opposed to more collectivist countries like China is usually the kind of core example. A lot of East Asian cultures are more collectivistic. But it turns out when you look at indications of individualism and collectivism, that individualism is rising all over the whole world. There's a lot of indications of this. Things that are like the percentage of people who live Alone things like marriage and divorce rates, the uniqueness of baby names, the language that we use in our cultural products, and how much we use kind of individualistic language like I and me versus we and us. And so they looked at just a really comprehensive array of indicators and that they really saw this very clear trend of there's more and more individualism now. The reason for that rising kind of standards of living and socioeconomic standards over the last century really frees us up from depending on first our immediate family and our immediate community. Because, of course, it used to be that when we were more agricultural societies, you grew up and you worked the farm and food production, or even further back and hunting and gathering, and that the family depended on you and you depended on the family. But that in our modern world, that's just less true. And that as we see this kind of rise in socioeconomic development, we see a rise in individualism.
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So let's recap. Collins started by telling us the real story behind the double helix. It wasn't an individual's discovery, it was a group discovery. He cited a study which looked at 19 million research papers and found that the best are almost always written by groups. And yet, due to the fundamental attribution error, we undervalue groups. And society as a whole is becoming more individualistic. There is a common view that working in a group just isn't that effective. But here's the strange thing. In some scenarios, that is true. In some scenarios, individuals in a group are less effective. You have probably experienced this yourself, whether it's sitting in a big bloated meeting where far less gets done, or working in a committee where you can never agree on anything. This feeling that being in a group will make you less effective. It has a name. It is called the Ringelmann Effect, the Ringleman Effect.
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The basic idea is, the more people you add to a group, the less hard any one individual will work within that group. Maximilian Ringelman was a French agricultural engineer essentially in the kind of late 1800s, early 1900s, and he was trying to study how many auks should pull different numbers of carts on a farm. And saying, it's like, should we have. If we have six oxen, should we split them up two oxen to three carts, or should we split them up three to two or six to one? Or how should we do this? As he was doing these kind of exercises with rope pulling, it was hard to do these studies on oxen, so he did them on humans to kind of see when coordination costs seem to overweigh the benefit of additional people.
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Coordination costs are typical within a group. With manual labour, for example, people walk at different paces, they have different grip, they might not all pull at the same time. And these tiny costs come through miscoordination. They add up to create this coordination cost. But before Ringleman, there was this general belief that even in a group, despite the coordination costs, people would still try their best. Yet this belief wasn't accurate. People didn't try their best.
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A
He found something that was pretty surprising, which is there didn't seem to be this tipping point of coordination costs. It was just kind of this linear effect that the more people you add, if you had measured how capable each individual was ahead of time, they tried progressively less hard with each additional person.
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On average, each man in this study could pull when they were measured alone, about 85 kg. But when they worked in groups of seven, the men pulled a mere 65 kg each. That is only 76% of their potential and a decline in performance of 24%.
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This is what we know as the Ringelmann effect. Today, every individual you add to a group. As group size gets larger, the effort of each individual gets smaller.
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Ringelman ran these studies over 100 years ago, but social scientists have proven their validity in more recent follow up experiments.
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The kind of open question from this research was how much of this is actual coordination costs and how much of it is kind of a psychological decrease in felt accountability and effort. And so in the 1970s, psychologists led by Bibb Latane were trying to kind of tease these two kind of great parts of group process apart. There's coordination and there's collective effort. They did these really clever studies where again, you have to be able to kind of measure each individual's capability ahead of time. So what they did is they, they put people into recording booths and they put really noise proof headphones on them and they would first have people clap and cheer as loudly as they can and measure, you know, how many decibels of noise they were generating. And then after they had this kind of like individual max measure, they would tell the same people that they were in groups of two or groups of six. Now in some conditions in these experiments, and there are a lot of these, but in some of them, these groups weren't real, that you were just imagining you were in a group or a group of two or a group of six. And here there's no coordination anymore, right, that we're doing a task where there can't be any coordination costs. So this is pure effort. And what he found was again this same decline from depending on the number of people you thought you were clapping along with, you'd try progressively less hard.
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In the study, groups of just two performed at 71% of their individual capabilities and groups of six performed at just 40%.
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And so this is what became known as social loafing was this psychological decrement in effort that didn't have anything to do with the coordination costs of the group. It's just purely due to our belief that when more other people are accountable for doing some task, we don't have to try as hard, and that we know our brains are always looking for excuses to conserve energy. And the presence of more other group members working on the same task is one of those excuses to conserve energy.
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Social loafing is widespread. A meta analysis of 78 different studies have confirmed that people try less hard in groups. The bigger the group, the the less hard they try. Colin writes that social loafing occurs in physical tasks like rope pulling, shouting and rowing. It also occurs in mental tasks like brainstorming new ideas and rating job candidates resumes. It happens in all kinds of groups, regardless of culture and demographics. And this it begs a Should we even bother working in groups? Shouldn't we just work alone? Well, not always. There are times when groups are needed. Find out exactly when after this quick break, the podcast I'd like to recommend Today is the DTCpod, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals, the DTCpod is a pod that is all about direct to consumer companies and products. If you're in E commerce, if you create sites where you sell stuff direct to consumers, this is a podcast that you definitely should listen to. If you're interested in learning the story behind your favourite D2C brands, then this is a podcast where you'll be able to find and understand those success stories. So go and listen to the DTC podcast wherever you get your podcasts. If your job is measured by the effectiveness of the content you create, then you have to check out the Audience Connection podcast hosted by Oli Atkinson and Lydia Chan. They've got over 30 years of real world experience between them, helping brands connect better with the people that matter. Each week they are joined by marketing and communication leaders from the world's largest brands, as well as behavioral scientists to reveal how great content sparks action and builds lasting connections. And I was one of their guests on one of their most recent episodes. So if you need your content to stick, go and subscribe to the Audience Connection wherever you get your Podcasts. Hello and welcome back. You are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. So far, Colin has shared how groups can cause social loafing, how being in a group can make us try less hard than we would if we were on our own. And Collins says that back in the 70s, this finding, this idea about social loafing, led most researchers to believe that group synergies simply didn't exist.
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There was so much attention kind of in the 1970s to what they called process losses, the loss in both coordination and effort that came from working in a group. And it got to the point that Ivan Steiner, who was kind of a theorist of groups at the time, had an equation. It's AP equals PP pl, which is the actual productivity of a group is equal to its potential productivity as measured by adding up all the individual capabilities minus these process losses of coordination and effort. And Steiner was going around teaching this for quite a while and that one of the students in the room was my mentor, Richard Hackman. And Richard asked Steiner, well, what about process gains? What about actual increases in motivation or kind of benefits that aren't simply just adding up individual contributions that come from working in a group? What are these process gains? And Steiner looked at him and said, well, I'll add them to the equation when someone proves they exist.
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And this really triggered decades of work from Hackman and others to try and find if synergies actually did exist in groups. If there were times when the sum of a group was actually more than its individual parts, if a group could achieve more than each of the individuals alone, eventually they did find evidence times when groups outperformed the individuals. But it only happened for certain types of tasks. Here's Colin sharing those findings, which were collected by four MIT professors.
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What they did is they created tasks where you could one individuals could do it so you could measure individual capabilities. And that's not true for everything. Like, you know, I used to be a professional jazz musician and like, there's no way sometimes to compare what a group can do to what an individual can do. It's, you literally can't have an individual do the task. So you have to come up with a task where it's hard enough that a group could have a benefit, but it's not so hard that an individual couldn't do it. And so they have these kind of room assignment puzzles where you have a certain number of students in the dorm that you're going to assign to a certain number of rooms, and you have a certain number of constraints. There were relatively simple puzzles and really complicated ones. And what they would do is they measure again the individual's capability. How fast could people do these problems? And there was a scoring system. So if you made mistakes, you have points deducted and so forth. How well did you do, how good was your solution and how efficient were you? What was the kind of like points per minute that you were coming up with? And then they had people do different puzzles in groups. And what they found was that on these simple puzzles, groups slowed people down and that they were quite a bit worse than the best individuals on average. They were just kind of inefficient on really simple puzzles. But on the most complex puzzles, the groups were just as fast as the best individual and they were quite a bit more efficient that they were able to get more points kind of per minute invested than individuals were.
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This breakthrough research finally proved that working in groups can have benefits. In complex tasks, groups were more eff than the average or even best individual. But the reverse was true in simple tasks, where groups are less efficient than individuals working alone. So complex tasks, groups can be better, but simple tasks, it's best to work alone. This study did find that the best individual, the smartest individual, still did get slightly better answers than the group in the complex tasks. But even so, it took them almost 50% longer. So groups really did win across the board when it came to complex tasks.
- [25:00]
A
And this really was consistent with when you took this finding and then you looked back at which studies had been finding an advantage for groups and which studies had been finding an advantage for individuals in prior research. That it really was when we were studying really complicated, especially knowledge, creativity, learning kind of work, that groups had an advantage. But when we were studying simple stuff like shouting in a room, like pulling on a rope, that we were finding a disadvantage of being in groups. So this really helped us get a handle on what before, I think, was kind of a debate among scholars from different traditions.
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Groups are incredibly important when tackling complex tasks. They're typically more efficient, faster and more effective than any individual working alone. That is why group led research papers are 6.3 times more likely to be cited 1,000 times. And yet, if your task is simple, if your meeting is about a straightforward topic, tackling it as a group, as a committee just isn't necessary. When groups tackle simple tasks, they fall foul of social loafing of that Ringleman effect. Setting up committees or creating these bloated meetings full of people to address simple tasks only lessens the output of all of the individuals. Instead, groups should be used for just complex challenges, the takeaway is rather simple. If a challenge is complex, reach out for help. But if it is simple, go ahead and work on it alone. That is all for today folks. I really hope you've enjoyed today's episode of Nudge. If you did, you will absolutely love Colin's latest book, his wonderful book, the Collective Edge. It goes into much, much more detail about the power of groups. You'll also hear about the behavioral science behind why groups work, and you'll learn more information about exactly when groups don't function well. I think it's a must read for really anyone who works in a business, but if you are a manager, I think it's vital to read because it will help explain how your group of employees function best. Colin will actually be back on Nudge next week, next Monday and on that show we will debunk one of the most popular team forming models in the world. It's a model that you've almost certainly heard of. It's a model you've almost certainly followed. And you'll definitely have to hear it because Colin says this model is totally pointless. So make sure you do not miss that episode. To make sure you don't miss it, just subscribe to Nudge. Wherever you get your podcasts on Apple, on Spotify, or subscribe to the Nudge newsletter, go to nudgepodcast.com and click Newsletter in the menu and I will send you an email next Monday as soon as that new podcast comes out. But if you're looking for something to listen to after this, you haven't got another episode of Nudge lined up, then I would strongly recommend you go and tune into the audience connection. It is a wonderful new show that I had the pleasure of appearing on very recently. Ollie Atkinson, the host, is really one of the best and he and I had a really fascinating discussion covering creativity and behavioral science. It's one of the most enjoyable times I've had as a guest on a podcast in a long time. So if you want something to listen to after this, go and search for the audience connection and look for the episode I was on or just any of those episodes. I think all of them are well worth a listen. All right, that is all folks. Thank you for listening to Colin and I will be back next Monday for another episode of Nudge. Cheers.