They create an application to escape Zoom meetings 2:04
(CNN) --
Collaboration was behind some of humanity's greatest achievements: the Beatles' greatest hits, putting a man on the moon, the smartphone.
Does zoom and other forms of video interaction impair the creative process that led to such feats?
Yes, it is confirmed by research published this Wednesday that discovered that it is easier to generate creative ideas in person.
It's an answer that many employers have been seeking for the past two years, as working from home has become the norm during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The US National Bureau of Economic Research said last year that 20% of working days will be from home when the pandemic ends, compared to just 5% before.
"We started the project (in 2016) because we heard from managers and executives that innovation was one of the biggest challenges with video engagement. And I'll admit, I was initially skeptical," said Melanie Brucks, assistant professor of business marketing at Columbia Business School and author of the study published in the scientific journal Nature.
Brucks said he previously believed that virtual interaction mimics a face-to-face experience "pretty well" and assumed that video conferencing's detractors were simply retrogrades.
He spent four years exploring whether it really had any impact on people's ability to come up with innovative ideas.
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He recruited 602 people, including college students and staff, and divided them into pairs to work on assignments, either in person or virtually.
The tasks were to find new uses for everyday objects, such as bubble wrap and a Frisbee, with the same five items in each room.
"When we innovate, we have to move away from existing solutions and come up with new ideas by expanding our knowledge elaboration. Proposing alternative ways of using familiar objects requires the same psychological process," he explained.
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The performance of each pair was determined by the number of ideas they came up with, the novelty, and the value of their ideas as ranked by the student judges.
(For example: creative use for a Frisbee: toss a fruit from the tree, deliver a message. Less creative: a picnic plate or a hat.)
The researchers also used eye-tracking software, which found that virtual participants spent more time looking directly at their partner, rather than looking around the room.
In addition, he said that couples who were on video conferences remembered their surroundings less, which was identical to those who met in person.
"This visual focus on the screen reduces cognition. In other words, people are more focused when interacting on video, which undermines a larger, more expansive idea generation process," Brucks said.
Jay Olson, a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in Canada who studies ways to measure creativity, said people often look to their surroundings to come up with new ideas.
"Objects in the room can trigger new associations more easily than trying to generate them all internally," said Olson, who was not involved in the research.
"The authors found that interacting across a computer screen may be inadvertently shifting attention in a way that reduces the generation of these novel ideas."
Findings in the real world
The findings were replicated in a similar but larger experiment outside the lab.
Some 1,490 engineers working in five different countries (in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia) for a telecommunications infrastructure company were randomly chosen in pairs, either face-to-face or via video call.
They were asked to come up with product ideas and choose one to present to the company.
Bruck said the findings were similar, even though the exercise was more complex than the lab test, the engineers knew each other beforehand, and were regular users of video conferencing software.
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"The field study shows that the negative effects of video conferencing on idea generation are not limited to simple tasks but can also manifest in more complicated and high-tech brainstorming sessions," he said.
"The fact that we replicate the negative effect of video conferencing on idea generation in the field setting suggests that the negative effect of video conferencing is not likely to diminish as people become more familiar with tools like Zoom or gain more experience ideating. and working with their teams.
But there were some important observations.
According to the study, video conferences did not hinder all collaborative work.
While brainstorming was easier in person, it didn't make a difference in the ability to critically evaluate creative ideas, such as picking the best idea from a set, Bruck said.
Creativity and zoom are not incompatible
Ellen Langer, a psychology professor at Harvard University and author of "On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity," said the new research is an important first step.
However, it would be a mistake to conclude that creativity and video conferencing are incompatible.
Whether or not we are creative while using Zoom may depend on how creative we are or the task at hand in the first place, said Langer, who was not involved in the research.
Generating uses for a Frisbee and generating novel ways of dealing with conflict are not the same thing: a task can be better accomplished alone, away from any kind of gathering.
"Perhaps many of us make friends faster in person than on Zoom, and creativity springs when we are relaxed. But when we Zoom from home, people are probably more relaxed than in an experiment," he added.
Olson and Langer suggested that there is a practical solution to the puzzle that could be tested in future research: If people were asked to spend more time looking around the room during their virtual sessions, would they generate as many ideas as they do during face-to-face sessions? ?
Olson said managers shouldn't rush to get people back into the office or add more face-to-face meetings as a result of this research, though it might be wise to hold brainstorming sessions in person.
"Although the effects appear to be strong, this is a single study and the effects are somewhat small, amounting to a difference of one or two ideas between the groups. What impact this has will depend on the company: it could range from a trivial difference to a massive compound effect," Olson said.
"I wouldn't want to see a company doubling their in-person meetings in hopes of improving their ability to innovate, if this also means doubling travel times, resulting in less happy and perhaps less creative employees."
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