New York (dpa) – Video conferences can be practical, especially in times of a pandemic, but they don’t seem to be conducive to creativity.
According to a recent study, people who are virtually networked come up with fewer creative ideas than those who sit together in a room. This is likely because the screen limits the field of view and therefore also narrows the mental processes that are useful for creative thinking, as a scientist writes in the journal Nature.
In the course of the corona pandemic, millions of employees have shifted to work from home and been forced to work together virtually, write Melanie Brucks of Columbia University and Joathan Levav of Stanford University. The unprecedented shift to full-time remote work has shown that work can also function at scale in virtual space.
For a long time, project collaboration depended on physical proximity, as communication technologies, such as telephone or e-mail, previously restricted the exchange of information. In videoconferencing, on the other hand, there is almost as much audiovisual information available as in face-to-face meetings, the researchers explain. This raises the question of whether new technology can also replace personal collaboration in developing new ideas.
A real replacement?
This is exactly what scientists have tested in a series of experiments. First, they asked teams of two out of a total of more than 600 test takers to develop new creative ideas for using a product, specifically for a Frisbee. Half of the couples sat together in a room, with the other half each partner sat alone in a room and the team was connected by videoconferencing.
It found that virtual couples developed significantly fewer creative ideas. However, when it came time to decide which idea to go ahead with, they performed no worse than the couples who worked face-to-face.
To test whether a narrowing of visual perception is really responsible for the brake on creativity, the researchers decorated the test rooms with various objects, some of which were expected, such as folders, and others unusual for office spaces, such as a poster with a skeleton. The researchers then followed the subjects’ gazes as they let their ideas flow and, at the end of the experiment, asked what they perceived in the room.
The result: Video partners looked at each other directly longer and remembered fewer objects in the room than couples interacting in person. The researchers go on to report that the more test subjects’ eyes wandered around the room and the more objects they remembered, the more creative ideas they developed.
They see the result as confirmation of the hypothesis that a narrow field of vision and therefore a narrow cognitive focus prevents thoughts from wandering and thus form associations that ultimately give rise to creative ideas.
sample in reality
The scientists then verified – and confirmed – their results under more realistic conditions on nearly 1,500 employees of a company in five countries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Finally, they examined whether other possible explanations for the observed differences in creativity could also be considered. For example, they ruled out that personal couples had developed more, but only very similar ideas. Through research, they determined that virtual couples felt just as connected and familiar as couples working together in person — so that didn’t explain the difference either. Finally, examinations of (body) language and facial expressions did not reveal any evidence that videoconferencing itself had decisively changed the communication and interaction of participants.
Scientists have a practical tip ready for employers as a conclusion of their study: if, as expected, with the end of the pandemic, many employees will work part of the time in the home office and part of the time in the office, which involves development, they should be more creative ideas, ideally occur in person.
For companies, the question of whether face-to-face or virtual meetings are better is also a financial decision, write Emőke-Ágnes Horvát and Brian Uzzi in a commentary on the study. If virtual teams presented fewer ideas but at a lower cost, forgoing face-to-face meetings could be a more productive decision for a company. Overall, the study provides an interesting starting point for further investigations into the influence of work technologies on human creativity.
© dpa-infocom, dpa:220427-99-62384/2