Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04643-y
COVID-19 accelerated a decade-long shift to remote work by normalizing working from home on a large scale. Indeed, 75% of US employees in a 2021 survey reported a personal preference for working remotely at least one day per week1, and studies estimate that 20% of US workdays will take place at home after the pandemic ends2.
Here we examine how this shift away from in-person interaction affects innovation, which relies on collaborative idea generation as the foundation of commercial and scientific progress3.
In a laboratory study and a field experiment across five countries (in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia), we show that videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas.
By contrast, when it comes to selecting which idea to pursue, we find no evidence that videoconferencing groups are less effective (and preliminary evidence that they may be more effective) than in-person groups.
Departing from previous theories that focus on how oral and written technologies limit the synchronicity and extent of information exchanged4,5,6, we find that our effects are driven by differences in the physical nature of videoconferencing and in-person interactions. Specifically, using eye-gaze and recall measures, as well as latent semantic analysis, we demonstrate that videoconferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus. Our results suggest that virtual interaction comes with a cognitive cost for creative idea generation.
Importantly, unexpected prop recall and gaze around the room were both significantly associated with an increased number of creative ideas (room recall: negative binomial regression, n = 151 pairs, b = 0.09, s.e. = 0.03, z = 2.82, P = 0.005; room gaze: negative binomial regression, n = 146 pairs, b = 0.003, s.e. = 0.001, z = 3.14, P = 0.002), and both of these measures independently mediated the effect of modality on idea generation (10,000 nonparametric bootstraps, recall: 95% CI = −0.61 to −0.01; gaze: 95% CI = −1.14 to −0.08; Extended Data Figs. 2 and 3). This combination of analyses converges on the view that virtual communication narrows visual focus, which subsequently hampers idea generation.
- Wuchty, S., Jones, B. F. & Uzzi, B. The increasing dominance of teams in production of knowledge. Science 316, 1036–1039 (2007).