Modeling Cognitive Interactions During Group Brainstorming

Abstract

Despite laboratory evidence that group brainstormers produce fewer ideas than individual brainstormers, brainstorming groups remain popular in business and industry. Here the authors present a model of the cognitive factors involved in group idea generation. Simulations suggest that group interaction should be beneficial when one group member primes another into thinking of ideas they would not have considered alone, at least not in the context of the task at hand. Many concepts relevant to group cognition can be defined within the model framework (stochastic transition matrices) including fluency, flexibility, category accessibility, convergent/divergent thinking, attention to partners, and the relationship between the knowledge structures of the brainstorming participants. Attention plays a crucial role in the model, linking together individuals in a brainstorming group. Simulations also suggest that convergent group behavior may be the result ofcognitivefactors in addition to the socialfactors outlined by a number of researchers.

The Personality Composition of Teams and Creativity: The Moderating Role of Team Creative Confidence

“…Although teams with certain personality compositions may have the potential to exhibit high levels of creativity (Driskell et al, 1987;Kurtzberg, 2005), previous theory suggests that such compositional benefits may only result in creative synergies when team members engage in collective idea generation efforts (Brown, Tumeo, Larey, & Paulus, 1998;Paulus, 2000). When members engage in such efforts, they are more likely to attend to and value the ideas presented by others, which, in turn, may stimulate members to generate new associations in areas they did not previously consider, allow them to build on others' contributions, or to combine others' ideas with ideas of their own (Brown et al, 1998;Hargadon & Bechky, 2006;Mednick, 1962).…”

“…When members engage in such efforts, they are more likely to attend to and value the ideas presented by others, which, in turn, may stimulate members to generate new associations in areas they did not previously consider, allow them to build on others' contributions, or to combine others' ideas with ideas of their own (Brown et al, 1998;Hargadon & Bechky, 2006;Mednick, 1962). To the extent that such idea cross-fertilization allows teams to produce ideas that go beyond those that could have been generated by members individually, creative synergies are likely to emerge (Kurtzberg & Amabile, 2001).…”

Revisiting absorptive capacity from a design perspective

“…Argote mentions that existing knowledge can be a disadvantage if managers generalize too much from past situations (Argote 1999). This effect is known in cognitive science and group psychology as a "fixation effect": the individual (Finke 1990;Jansson and Smith 1991;Finke, Ward and Smith 1992;Smith, Ward and Schumacher 1993;Ward 1994;Ward, Smith and Finke 1999) as well as the group (Diehl and Stroebe 1987;Mullen, Johnson and Salas 1991;Paulus and Dzindolet 1993) (Brown et al 1998;Paulus, Brown and Ortega 1999;Paulus, Larey and Dzindolet 2000) tend to be stuck by existing knowledge and design rules into one (or a limited number of) problem space(s).…”

A Framework for Evaluating the Tension between Sharing and Protecting Health Information

“…The task forces comprised WesternHIE staff as well as members of the community (e.g., the privacy and security task force comprised 13 members that included a hospital privacy officer who was also an attorney, the director of health information management at another hospital, the general counsel for a third hospital, a state Medicaid administrator, the corporate compliance manager for a large physician's group, ...) The diversity of participants was both a benefit and a challenge because, while multiple perspectives produced a greater range of ideas, each participant also had to consider other perspectives and think more broadly [7,9].…”