Coginitive Interdependence [Deep Dive] - Moreland series - Part 2

The US Army funded work by four social scientists in Pittsburgh all centered around the influence of turnover on small groups. Work groups in the Army often experience member turnover for a variety of reasons (e.g. transfer, injury, death, etc.) which makes their interest in this area very understandable. In this post, I hope to walk through some of the studies that the Army funded. As far as I know, only one of the studies in this set has been published in an academic journal. There was, however, a technical report given to the Army that I will be basing the information from this post on. This report can be found here: http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA433897

On the project were 4 primary researchers: John Levine, Dick Moreland, Linda Argote, and Kathleen Carley. Dick and Linda were mentioned in prior posts on cognitive interdependence from their extremely important experiments. John Levine was a frequent collaborator with Dick and Linda who is also interested in group behavior. Kathleen Carley is a somewhat different kind of researcher, specializing in computational simulations. In computational simulations, researchers create a set of rules for a world and then see what the outcomes of the world are once the actors in the world interact for a while. The rules in the world can then be adjusted to see if the actors behave much differently or if the outcomes are different. From the abstract of the study, we can see that the researchers intended to gain insight into how personnel turnover impacted groups completing different kinds of tasks. The variety of the researchers also allowed the use of laboratory and simulation-based approaches. Due to two of the researcher's prior investment in the concept of transactive memory, this was included as a component in these studies. Indeed, the lab studies that these researchers competed were a direct extension of those studies.

Productivity Experiment 1 - Turnover and Rumors of Turnover

In the first study, groups of 3 were trained together on a construction task (it isn't made completely clear but I believe it was the radio assembly task used in Liang et al., 1995). There were two manipulations: the groups were warned that there would be turnover (or not) and groups experienced turnover (or not). The warning occurred before the group trained together and the turnover occurred at the beginning of the second performance session. The researchers measured transactive memory and two measured of performance: whether the group could recall the task without having access to the circuit and assembly errors. The results for this first study, in the words of the researchers "were difficult to interpret".

When groups didn't actually experience turnover, they recalled more of the task if they were told that they were going to experience turnover. This makes sense because the group members may have tried more to individually memorize how to do the task if they knew that they couldn't rely on each other. For groups that experienced turnover, however, groups that did not expect turnover recalled more of the task than those that did expect turnover. As for errors, if groups experienced turnover, they performed much better, regardless of whether they were warned that there could be turnover. The researchers made a guess that the newcomers may have just tried really hard, which could explain the effects with errors. In future studies, they made sure to limit the newcomers training harder than the other members.

Productivity Experiment 2 - Turnover and Expertise Information

In this study, all groups were trained together on the task. In the control condition, the group was not warned of turnover and there was no turnover. In the second condition, turnover occurred without warning. In the other three conditions, the groups were warned there would be turnover and then given information about the newcomer's skills. The conditions varied on who received the information, just oldtimers, just newcomers, or both. The researchers measured transactive memory and errors.

As expected, groups that didn't experience turnover made fewer errors than those that experienced unexpected turnover. Groups in the other three conditions where someone received information about the newcomer, all made fewer mean errors than the groups that unexpectedly experienced turnover. Groups where the oldtimers received information about the newcomer made the same number of errors as groups that didn't experience turnover. Interestingly, when the information only went to the newcomer or to both newcomers and oldtimers, groups made slightly more errors. The researchers found nearly mirror results for transactive memory. Groups that didn't experience turnover had the highest transactive memory and groups were oldtimers received information had similarly high levels of TMS.

The researchers then shifted into looking at the effects of turnover on innovation. These studies will be considered next.

Cognitive Interdependence [Deep Dive] - Moreland Series Part 1

In this post, I hope to describe in more detail a few of the transactive memory studies that were conducted at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Richard Moreland was typically on these studies with Linda Argote also involved in several. These researchers were continuing the series of studies that began with the seminal paper with Diane Liang as lead author that was published in 1995. This study was followed in 1996 and 1998 by other experiments. It was not until 2000 that another TMS paper by this group was accepted into an academic journal.

Richard Moreland had been involved with the transactive memory studies using the electrical circuit tasks since the beginning. He, like Daniel Wegner, was a social psychologist and was primarily interested in how this interdependent view of memory influenced what was known about group psychology. He, with frequent coauthor John Levine, had been extremely influential in the area of groups research. Dick, as Moreland often goes by, and John had both proposed a fairly comprehensive theory of group socialization throughout the 80s that had been widely accepted. The seminal aspect of this theory in the chart below.

Before and after a member joins the group, their level of commitment increases to the group up to a point. At different points in an individual's commitment, they are likely to be accepted, to put in more effort, and eventually to leave the group. Their work after these theory was, to a certain extent, focused on how group members could be brought up the commitment curve faster and be more quickly socialized. This interest, I believe, led the researchers to consider group training and transactive memory as an interesting avenue to explore.

After the initial round of studies, these researchers felt like they had a good handle on the phenomena of transactive memory development. Group members spending time together led them to have more accurate perceptions of expertise, leading the group members to more easily coordinate and trust one another. The manipulation to encourage transactive memory, however, includes more information than just expertise to the group members. It could possibly lead the group member to like one another more because they have spend more time together. A few of the experiments controlled for this factor but the researchers thought that there might be other ways to methodologically deal with this concern.

Enter, Moreland and Myaskovsky (2000). Wegner's theory and the prior papers proposed that the transactive memory of the group is composed of information about expertise. In Wegner's experiments, this was due to the romantic couple spending time together and in the earlier Moreland studies it was due to the group members interacting during the training period. In the 2000 paper, however, the researchers isolated the manipulation to just the aspect that the theory mentions, information about expertise. I think this study is perfect in that is smartly builds on prior work, isolating the mechanism, but keeps many other aspects identical which allows us to generalize the findings to past work more easily.

In Moreland and Myaskovsky (2000), all of the members engaging in the radio construction task worked independently or in a group during that first meeting. Then, for half of the independent groups, their work was systematically graded based on area of ability and compared to the other members. A member would then receive a sheet that said the rank of each group member on each of several different categories of skill. Other groups did not receive this information. The researchers found that just providing this limited information about other members, groups performed just as well as if they had been trained together. This suggests that the information about the member's relative skill is helpful for performance, and as helpful as training the group members altogether. The groups that received this performance feedback were not statistically different from the groups that trained together in their level of TMS as measured from the video tapes. Granted, the groups that received performance feedback instead of training together did perform worse and have lower TMS at a mean level, but the values were close.

This particular study attracted the US Army's attention. These researchers applied for and received a grant from the Army to more deeply investigate the effects of performance feedback on groups, especially groups that have employee turnover (like many army groups do). The Army was interested if transactive memory is helpful in small work teams and if providing individualized performance feedback to the group could be a way of quickly building a team's sense of being a group and performance. I will next discuss these studies (never formally published but available in a technical report).

**Personal information about the researchers was attained second-hand and may not be accurate.

Cognitive Interdependence - Part 4

Competing theoretical underpinnings

Discuss the extensions of TMS more into management, prevalence in that area, the eventual acceptance of Sparrow into Science.

Liang, Moreland, and Argote (1995) sought to bring Wegner's work into wider recognition within both the worlds of management and experimental psychology. Though I am sure that there was other interest percolating in transactive memory in the meantime, Liang's study brought significant added momentum to the research area. As mentioned before, the researchers proposed that groups that had been trained together would perform better than those that trained individually. The researchers found that groups that trained together made about 2 errors on average whereas groups that trained individually made more than 5 errors. When the measures from the videotapes were included, the results were clear. Groups that trained together engaged in more of those three processes than other groups. They coordinated better, developed more distinct specializations in the task, and trusted one another's expertise. The researchers proposed that groups that were trained together were able to coordinate in this way because they had the opportunity to develop transactive memory. These three factors are still considered fundamental components (though some say indicators) of transactive memory within a group. The most widely used scale to measure transactive memory systems within groups was developed by Kyle Lewis in 2003 and measures these three components.

What does it all mean though? The going idea within groups research for some time did not really have a good explanation for why groups typically perform better over time. It was clear that individual perform better over time and that group members grow to like one another over time. However, there were still effects of 'group learning' controlling for these other factors. The researchers made a guess that the development of a shared system for coordination and expertise exchange could help explain how group learning was occurring. After looking into the literature, there was some work in the area of shared mental models but this work suggests that over time groups develop a sharedness in how they think things should be done. The researchers had a feeling though that the reason groups do better over time has more to do with how individuals differentiate, specialize into unique roles. And that is essentially what they found.

To confirm that there weren't other effects, the researchers then did a series of studies that looked at the effects of team building exercises and scrambling team members so that they no longer worked with the same people int he second half of the study. They found consistent results that team-building was not as good as training in terms of group performance. This study helped clarify a secondary point earlier that team-building exercises, though good for some things, do not really help groups perform better. If you are most interested in performance, on-the-job training is much more effective than building bonds with your coworkers. The researchers also found that the effects of training together were not just individual. To test this, they randomly assigned people to groups after they were trained together. What they found was that even if an individual was trained as part of a group, that training isn't that helpful if they are working in a new group. This all suggested that there was something important about group training and keeping that group together.

After these studies came out, Andrea Hollingshead began doing some extremely influential work at the University of Illinois going back to the roots of transactive memory research (starting in 1998). She explored transactive memory using romantic couples and has found some really intriguing effects. Even if a romantic couple can't talk to one another, they are able to implicitly coordinate when given a list of words such that one person remembers a set of words and the other person remembers a different set of words. Hollingshead proposed that if the words fit within one of the person's areas of expertise that they would take more effort to remember it and the other person would know not to commit effort to remembering it.

Lewis's scale, published in 2003, has made the measurement of TMS much easier for researchers. An alternative scale (Austin, 2003) is also used sometime though the difficulty in implementing the scale has led it to be less popular. Transactive memory research is now discussed in many research areas and has been accepted into top academic journals. After a controversial article in Science (Sparrow et al., 2011) it even got a mention on the Colbert Report. As with most scientific phenomena, after the initial flourish, there has been more reanalysis and reevaluation of the phenomenon. Lewis and Herndon (2011) proposed more concrete and systematic ways to think of transactive memory, possibly as an attempt to reduce abuses of the concept by researchers less familiar with its intricacies.

I believe I will publish a few more blog posts on this concept but I hope these four posts have provided a deep and (at least marginally) interesting insight into the origin of transactive memory.

**Personal information about the researchers was attained second-hand and may not be accurate.