Despite decades of research in economics and psychology attempting to identify ingredients that make up successful teams, neuroscientists have only just begun to study how multiple brains interact. Recent research has shown that people’s brain activity becomes synchronized with others’ (inter-brain synchrony) during social engagement. However, little is known as to whether inter-brain synchrony relates to collective behavior within teams. Here, we merge the nascent field of group neuroscience with the extant literature of team dynamics and collective performance. We recruited 174 participants in groups of 4 and randomly assigned them to complete a series of problem-solving tasks either independently or as a team, while simultaneously recording each person’s brain activity using an EEG hyperscanning setup. This design allowed us to examine the relationship between group identification and inter-brain synchrony in explaining collective performance. As expected, teammates identified more strongly with one another, cooperated more on an economic game, and outperformed the average individual on most problem-solving tasks. Crucially, inter-brain synchrony, but not self-reported group identification, predicted collective performance among teams. These results suggest that inter-brain synchrony can be informative in understanding collective performance among teams where self-report measures may fail to capture behavior.

中文翻译：

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团队中的脑间同步可以预测集体表现

尽管数十年的经济学和心理学研究试图找出成功团队的组成要素，但神经科学家才刚刚开始研究多个大脑如何相互作用。最近的研究表明，在社交活动中，人们的大脑活动与他人的大脑活动变得同步（脑间同步）。然而，关于脑间同步是否与团队内的集体行为有关，人们知之甚少。在这里，我们将新兴的群体神经科学领域与现有的团队动力和集体绩效文献相结合。我们招募了 174 名参与者，每组 4 人，随机分配他们独立或团队完成一系列解决问题的任务，同时使用脑电图超扫描装置记录每个人的大脑活动。这种设计使我们能够在解释集体表现时检查群体认同和脑间同步之间的关系。正如预期的那样，团队成员之间的认同感更加强烈，在经济游戏中的合作也更加紧密，并且在大多数解决问题的任务中表现优于普通人。至关重要的是，大脑间的同步，而不是自我报告的群体认同，可以预测团队之间的集体表现。这些结果表明，脑间同步可以为理解团队的集体绩效提供信息，而自我报告措施可能无法捕捉行为。