Psychology: Video calls are shown to reduce creativity

 
It was proved that it is harder to generate original ideas in the exchange by videophone than in the face-to-face exchange.The paper reporting on this study isNature Will be published in.Our findings suggest that cognitive costs may be incurred when collaborating in virtual interactions to generate ideas.

In a pandemic of the new coronavirus infection (COVID-19), millions of employees are forced to work from home indefinitely and collaborate virtually using video conference technology. lost.In the United States, studies estimate that 20% of working days will be telecommuting after the pandemic has converged, with leading companies in various industries such as Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan, and Amazon. We are trying to make the rules for working from home more flexible.However, research has not progressed on the impact of reducing face-to-face interaction and how it can affect innovation.

Now, Melanie Brucks and Jonathan Levav are working with a telecommunications infrastructure company in five countries around the world to explore how the use of videophones can affect collaborative idea-creating work. We hired 5 participants at our offices (Europe, Middle East, South Asia).These participants are randomly grouped into pairs of two people, each pair having face-to-face or videophone ideas for product ideas, and then ideas for future product innovation for the company. It was presented as an assignment to select and submit one.As a result, face-to-face collaborative pairs generated more ideas and creative ideas than virtual collaborative pairs.However, when choosing ideas to promote, there was no difference between face-to-face and videophone.These results were also confirmed in a laboratory experiment using optotype tracking data, and the pair using a videophone spent more time looking directly at the other person on the screen than looking around the room.

The authors suggest that in the case of videophone, attention is focused on communication with the other party on the screen, which narrows the target of cognition and makes it difficult to generate original ideas.However, since the critical evaluation of an original idea uses a cognitive process different from the idea generation, it is not affected even if the target of cognition is narrowed.Our findings suggest that face-to-face interaction may be useful for creative work, but other types of collaborative work are unaffected.

 
* This article is reprinted from "Nature Japan Featured Highlights".
Reprinted from: "Psychology: Videophone interaction has been demonstrated to reduce creativity'