Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
How intermittent breaks in interaction improve collective intelligence.
Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial
- Individual incentives that promote collective intelligence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Does digital collective learning improve with more participants? An experiment on a collective learning platform.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- Blinding to Circumvent Human Biases: Deliberate Ignorance in Humans, Institutions, and Machines.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- How networks shape diversity for better or worse.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Interaction among participants in a collective intelligence experiment: an emotional approach.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Multidisciplinary learning through collective performance favors decentralization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Individual exploration and selective social learning: balancing exploration-exploitation trade-offs in collective foraging.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Evolutionary emergence of collective intelligence in large groups of students.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Interdisciplinary collaboration from diverse science teams can produce significant outcomes.PloS one · 2022Article
- Article
- Task complexity moderates group synergy.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Modularity and composite diversity affect the collective gathering of information online.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Quantifying collective intelligence in human groups.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Unity Is Intelligence: A Collective Intelligence Experiment on ECG Reading to Improve Diagnostic Performance in Cardiology.Journal of Intelligence · 2021Article
- The diversity bonus in pooling local knowledge about complex problems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Article
- Speaking out of turn: How video conferencing reduces vocal synchrony and collective intelligence.PloS one · 2021Article
- Do synthesis centers synthesize? A semantic analysis of topical diversity in research.Research policy · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
People influence each other when they interact to solve problems. Such social influence introduces both benefits (higher average solution quality due to exploitation of existing answers through social learning) and costs (lower maximum solution quality due to a reduction in individual exploration for novel answers) relative to independent problem solving. In contrast to prior work, which has focused on how the presence and network structure of social influence affect performance, here we investigate the effects of time. We show that when social influence is intermittent it provides the benefits of constant social influence without the costs. Human subjects solved the canonical traveling salesperson problem in groups of three, randomized into treatments with constant social influence, intermittent social influence, or no social influence. Groups in the intermittent social-influence treatment found the optimum solution frequently (like groups without influence) but had a high mean performance (like groups with constant influence); they learned from each other, while maintaining a high level of exploration. Solutions improved most on rounds with social influence after a period of separation. We also show that storing subjects' best solutions so that they could be reloaded and possibly modified in subsequent rounds-a ubiquitous feature of personal productivity software-is similar to constant social influence: It increases mean performance but decreases exploration.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.