鑽石舞台

Interviewee: Melanie Brucks

When the pandemic hit, I had so many people reaching out to me asking about like how to run Zoom studies, and what's the research out there.

Interviewer: Shamini Bundell

This is Melanie Brucks, a researcher with an interest in creativity and innovation. Melanie wanted to directly compare in-person and virtual conversations.

Interviewee: Melanie Brucks

This work looks at what we are now calling the 『new normal』, which is virtual interaction, and how that might affect innovation.

Interviewer: Shamini Bundell

To test this idea, Melanie set up an experiment involving pairs of people given a creative challenge.

Interviewee: Melanie Brucks

Participants would either go into the same physical space, which was just an empty lab room, or we would split them into two separate lab rooms and have them communicate with video technology.

Interviewer: Shamini Bundell

Participants were asked to come up with creative uses for particular everyday objects, as many ideas as they could in five minutes. The results showed that the in-person pairs generated more ideas.

Interviewee: Melanie Brucks

We were really interested in when we saw the results, that simply being in the same physical space as someone else improves idea generation. So, in-person groups are generating around 16 or 17 ideas, whereas the virtual condition is generating between 13 and 15.

Interviewer: Shamini Bundell

But is this really that surprising?

Interviewee: Melanie Brucks

When we first started talking about this research idea to different people, a lot of people mentioned yeah, Zoom is just a worse version. Of course, people are just bad at Zoom, like everything is going to be worse at Zoom.

Interviewer: Shamini Bundell

So, maybe this has nothing to do with creativity. Melanie tested this with a second task.

Interviewee: Melanie Brucks

And what we asked participants was to identify their most creative idea.

Interviewer: Shamini Bundell

The idea selection task uses very different skills from the brainstorming task.

Interviewee: Melanie Brucks

But what's interesting is video conferencing wasn't universally bad. When it came to idea selection, we found, if anything, the virtual condition was better. The virtual condition identified a higher-quality idea than the in-person condition. Now, this is a smaller effect, so we can't say for certain that they're better, but they certainly aren't worse.

Interviewer: Shamini Bundell

So, what is it that might make idea generation, and only idea generation, harder over a video call?

Interviewee: Melanie Brucks

We looked at how much participants felt they connected with the other through self-report. We looked at unconscious connection through mimicry. We looked at trust through a monetary game. We also looked at how much there were speaker switches to see if there was trouble with communication coordination. We looked at whether there was crosstalk where people were talking over each other for communication coordination. What we find is, for the social connection, no difference between conditions. For the communication coordination, we did find slight differences, but it couldn't explain the effect. Even controlling for these differences, we still find that the virtual condition performs worse when it comes to idea generation.

Interviewer: Shamini Bundell

But there was one difference between virtual and in-person conversations that did seem to make a difference, and Melanie spotted it by tracking people's gaze.

Interviewee: Melanie Brucks

Are you looking at your partner, are you looking at the surrounding environment, or are you looking at the task? And it's interesting, again, if you ask people what their intuition is, they think that there's more social connection when we're in person, and so we’re probably engaged with our partner more. But we found the exact opposite, so we found that in the virtual condition, people are looking significantly more at their partner, almost double. And because of that, it's at the expense of their broader environment.

Interviewer: Shamini Bundell

Previous research has shown that people are more creative when they're less focused.

Interviewee: Melanie Brucks

And we realised there's a difference in the physical setup because when I'm communicating in person, I have the entire environment as our shared environment. Wherever I look, that is going to be part of my partner's environment too. However, when we're talking virtually, our shared environment is pretty limited to the screen, and so if I want to show engagement, if I want to be involved in this interaction, it makes more sense for me to limit myself to a screen. And we thought that this could lead to more focus, which should hurt idea generation because we're actually the most creative when we're unfocused and free.

Interviewer: Shamini Bundell

So, rather than online conversations being inherently always better or worse, it could be that we need to adjust how we talk based on what we want to achieve.

Interviewee: Melanie Brucks

I use this now all the time. I don't have evidence for this yet, but based on my theory, I always suggest turning off the camera during idea generation so you can walk around, you can look around.

Interviewer: Shamini Bundell

The idea that virtual meetings could impact things like focus and idea generation is likely to be of great interest to people around the world. But it's not as simple as saying, right, let's get back to the office then.

Interviewee: Melanie Brucks

It’s not like we have to be in person. It’s not also that it doesn't matter whether or not we're in person.

Interviewer: Shamini Bundell

Melanie is keen to test her theories further, but there's a bit of a problem.

Interviewee: Melanie Brucks

All of this research has been halted because we can't collect in person data without people wearing masks, and that of course completely changes the experience. So, there's tons of different experiments I would love to run that I haven't been able to do because we can't run in-person studies right now.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

That was Melanie Brucks from Columbia Business School in the US. For more on this research, be sure to check out the show notes, where there』ll be a link to Melanie’s paper.