This week’s discussion is not on a particular research paper, but teamwork in scientific research in general. Reading materials include three sources.
“The Matthew Effect in Science” is the first reading. It was written by a sociologist and was published in Science in 1968. The major argument is that well-known scientists are rewarded more recognition than lesser-known scientists. For our own interest, we covered the section “Social and Psychological Bases of the Matthew Effect”. This part discusses several characteristics common among great scientists, among them self-confidence and self-criticism, good taste of selecting the right problem with risk rather than a problem with no risk at all, and standards for work worth publishing versus not.
The second reading is a relatively short journal article from The Guardian, titled “In science today, a genius never works alone”. The author argued that whether or not there will be more or fewer individual heroic geniuses does not matter because what matters is the nature of scientific progress. That is, people become experts in their fields, they share and challenge existing scientific knowledge or other people’s ideas.
The last reading is from the author of “The Power of Habit”, Charles Duhigg. The article is titled “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team”. We read about lessons on teamwork from Julia Rozovsky who was once a student at Yale School of Management. Her experience at business school showed that work dynamics could vary so drastically in different study groups. Julia was later hired by Google and was assigned to Project Aristotle, an internal study on Google’s teams to analyze why some teams work well together while others do not. Project Aristotle’s researchers found that the most important factor for a team to succeed is psychological safety. In particular, the researchers found two important phenomenons. The first is what is referred to as “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking”. That is roughly, each team member speaks roughly about the same amount of time during meetings or conversations. The second phenomenon is high “average social sensitivity”, which means that team members usually infer and understand others’ emotional states through many nonverbal ways like eye contact or tone of voices.
Presenter: Max Liu