ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Task complexity moderates group synergy.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- When combinations of humans and AI are useful: A systematic review and meta-analysis.Nature human behaviour · 2024Pooled it
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- Better together? Effects of task complexity and social setting on performance and cognitive load.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- AI-Augmented Co-Design in Healthcare: Log-Based Markers of Teamwork Behaviors and Collective Intelligence Outcomes.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- The dynamics of leadership and success in software development teams.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Seven years of time-tracking data capturing collaboration and failure dynamics: the Gryzzly dataset.Scientific data · 2025Article
- How large language models can reshape collective intelligence.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
- Reconsidering Leadership Development: From Programs to Developmental Systems.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Network structure shapes the impact of diversity in collective learning.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Organizational system thinking as a cognitive framework to meet climate targets.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Flexible social inference facilitates targeted social learning when rewards are not observable.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Multidisciplinary learning through collective performance favors decentralization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- A guide to megastudies.PNAS nexus · 2022Article
- The distribution of initial estimates moderates the effect of social influence on the wisdom of the crowd.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Overcoming Individual Limitations Through Distributed Computation: Rational Information Accumulation in Multigenerational Populations.Topics in cognitive science · 2022Article
- The potential for effective reasoning guides children's preference for small group discussion over crowdsourcing.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Task complexity moderates group synergy.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Complexity-defined in terms of the number of components and the nature of the interdependencies between them-is clearly a relevant feature of all tasks that groups perform. Yet the role that task complexity plays in determining group performance remains poorly understood, in part because no clear language exists to express complexity in a way that allows for straightforward comparisons across tasks. Here we avoid this analytical difficulty by identifying a class of tasks for which complexity can be varied systematically while keeping all other elements of the task unchanged. We then test the effects of task complexity in a preregistered two-phase experiment in which 1,200 individuals were evaluated on a series of tasks of varying complexity (phase 1) and then randomly assigned to solve similar tasks either in interacting groups or as independent individuals (phase 2). We find that interacting groups are as fast as the fastest individual and more efficient than the most efficient individual for complex tasks but not for simpler ones. Leveraging our highly granular digital data, we define and precisely measure group process losses and synergistic gains and show that the balance between the two switches signs at intermediate values of task complexity. Finally, we find that interacting groups generate more solutions more rapidly and explore the solution space more broadly than independent problem solvers, finding higher-quality solutions than all but the highest-scoring individuals.
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