The section I found most interesting was on group performance. I notice that the problems mentioned were mostly pretty small:
When asking small groups to perform a wide range of tasks, including brainstorming, sudoku, and unscrambling words, the performance on a subset of the tasks gives a good out-of-sample prediction.
Do you know of any studies where groups were asked to tackle more complex problems or tasks? This is obviously much harder to study, but also seems more relevant to a range of real-world use cases.
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Many of the most successful collectives in recent history began as startups (small groups of people running an enterprise together). Discussions of these organizations often highlight the intelligence of individual members, and the literature on startup hiring often emphasizes looking for the smartest/âmost impressive people. Social perceptiveness gets less attention, but is also harder to see; itâs easier to say âMark Zuckerberg is smartâ than to study a bunch of early Facebook meetings.
On the one hand, I wonder whether this leads to social perceptiveness being underrated. On the other hand, I wonder whether the greater difficulty of studying work on harder/âlarger-scale problems weighs in favor of social perceptiveness â e.g. if perceptiveness matters more for something like âallocating the groupâs work between small, simple tasksâ than âdetermining how to approach problems too difficult for any one member to succeedâ.
(I havenât read the cited studies yet, so maybe these questions would have obvious answers if I did.)
The section I found most interesting was on group performance. I notice that the problems mentioned were mostly pretty small:
Do you know of any studies where groups were asked to tackle more complex problems or tasks? This is obviously much harder to study, but also seems more relevant to a range of real-world use cases.
*****
Many of the most successful collectives in recent history began as startups (small groups of people running an enterprise together). Discussions of these organizations often highlight the intelligence of individual members, and the literature on startup hiring often emphasizes looking for the smartest/âmost impressive people. Social perceptiveness gets less attention, but is also harder to see; itâs easier to say âMark Zuckerberg is smartâ than to study a bunch of early Facebook meetings.
On the one hand, I wonder whether this leads to social perceptiveness being underrated. On the other hand, I wonder whether the greater difficulty of studying work on harder/âlarger-scale problems weighs in favor of social perceptiveness â e.g. if perceptiveness matters more for something like âallocating the groupâs work between small, simple tasksâ than âdetermining how to approach problems too difficult for any one member to succeedâ.
(I havenât read the cited studies yet, so maybe these questions would have obvious answers if I did.)