Transcriber: Muskaan Gupta Reviewer: Emma Gon
Isn’t it hard to create true innovation by yourself
or when everybody on the team is the same?
But collaboration across disciplines is also really hard.
But we have to work together to solve these hard problems.
I’m Mary Beth and I’m a computer scientist,
so I’ve spent my career using technology to combine the virtual world
with the physical world, making augmented realities.
Some exemples of augmented reality are the virtual first downline
that you see during football broadcasts
and the social media camera filters folks use to modify their faces online.
(Laughter)
I’m Anne, an applied experimental psychologist.
I solve real world design problems by studying human cognition,
both in terms of our abilities and our limitations.
And we've been working together for decades as researchers,
but we're very different people.
Because I was a computer nerd and science fair winner in high school.
Nowadays, my hobbies include playing the Nintendo Switch,
hosting dinner parties with way too much food and memorizing hip hop lyrics.
(Laughter)
I was a science late bloomer, I like walking barefoot through the woods.
My big plan was to work for National Geographic and live in a tent.
(Laughter)
But our most recent collaboration is one where we hope to one day
help the crew on space missions to function
in complicated, cluttered environments like this one.
We’re researching how to use technology
to filter out the distracting sights and sounds
so that the astronauts can focus on their complex assignments.
This is called diminished reality, which is a new type of augmented reality.
Now, in our 20 years working together,
we’ve come across some concepts
that form the foundation of our collaborative relationship.
And today we’d like to share with you some real world examples of all three.
And all three are based in the science of human behavior.
The first is about understanding work cultures and building mutual respect.
Cultural differences are inevitable when you're working with others.
Now, we sometimes do not even speak the same language.
Very clear to me, I don't know.
But beyond the differences in jargon, in a broader sense,
computer scientists and engineers are often interested in making something
because we can.
While we psychologists, we question why and whether we should.
But we can bridge these cultural differences
through an understanding of the concept - Theory of Mind.
So to have a theory of mind of another person,
it means that you understand that their knowledge and skills
could be very different from your own.
But we are terrible at this.
We tend to assume other people know the same things that we do
or that they would solve a problem in the same way.
But if both parties are invested in this partnership,
so they seek to learn about each other's cultures,
then a shared mental model can be built.
So, for example, we’re in very different fields
and we actually have very different job roles,
which means that success in our careers depend on very different types of work.
I’m a professor, I live in the world of publish or perish.
I have to publish my work to succeed.
And I’m a research scientist, paid out of external funding.
So I may have an industry sponsor who does not care about research papers.
They need a working prototype or a fully formed product,
like a museum installation.
While I need my team to produce generalizable scientific results
and scientific results like this that usually come from a lab.
And while my team’s job is usually to build working computer systems,
often in reality, the hard part isn’t in the building,
it’s in figuring out what to build.
Frequently, people in our two different areas do not understand
the goals of the other discipline.
The computer scientists may think that psychology is a soft science
or that we’re always raining on their parade
when our experimental designs make for a lot of work for their developers.
And I have been on teams with non-technical people
(Laughter)
who maybe have seen too many computer hacker movies.
(Laughter)
So they think it’s easy for me
to just whip up a VR app in a few minutes, isn’t it?
(Laughter)
So it was the start of the pandemic,
when we realized that we had to tap in to this idea
of Theory of Mind to really get all the information from each of our teams.
So picture it, spring of 2020,
we’re about to kick off our funded project in diminished reality,
and we were going to run it in the lab like this.
But during lockdown, our team members couldn’t even be
in the same room together.
So, Anne was worried that we would just have to stop working completely.
So we realized that we need to take time
for open communication to try to find some creative solutions.
And this meant communicating our knowledge
and our concerns to each other.
So when we met, I refocused on the vision of the project.
Originally, we were going to bring people into the lab
and have them assemble complex medical devices under duress,
all while we measure their accuracy, performance,
and the experimenters could trigger different distractions.
Now, I knew from working with Mary Beth in the past
that we could probably do this in virtual reality.
But what I didn’t understand was
how we could maintain experimental control
and make sure every person had the exact same experience.
So when and broke down this project vision
kind of in this two the simplest form,
I realized that she was describing a video game.
(Laughter)
Because in an online video game,
people from around the world can simultaneously inhabit
these virtual spaces and they can interact with each other in real time.
So I thought, well, let’s build an online video game.
And the experimenter and the participant can be together in that game.
And in that way, the experimenter can control
what’s happening in the virtual reality.
And this was super exciting
because this meant that not only could we have that experimental control,
because the experimenters were in the game with the participants,
but they could also log into our experiment
from the safety of their own homes,
using their own phones and just a simple cardboard headset.
And because my team understood and respected the ultimate project goal,
we were able to recognize what was needed
to make this a valid scientific experiment and not just a game.
And because my team invested time
and understanding Mary best unique perspective,
we were allowed to explore all that the technology could offer.
And together, we always kept our eye on that ultimate goal,
which was studying human cognitive ability.
And our lesson here was that we don’t value what we don’t understand.
Investing time and effort in understanding each other’s mental models,
that took a lot of time and effort, but it was critical.
Now, our second concept, even for us,
project collaboration doess not always go smoothly.
And so in those moments, we found it’s really valuable to understand
the fundamental attribution error.
Now, this is a cognitive bias where when we make a mistake,
we don’t blame ourselves because we know why we slipped up.
We know all the external factors that made us make the mistake.
But when someone else falls short, we blame them personally.
Think about how you feel when you’re driving in rush hour traffic
and someone cuts you off dangerously.
You likely assume that they are an idiot with a death wish.
But when you cut someone off,
you know that it's because you're rushing to pick your kid up from school
or you’re trying to catch your flight at the airport.
Though it was late on a Friday afternoon when I received an email
from my financial department saying
that the project I shared with Mary Beth had officially ended
and that therefore a large sum of money
that was supposed to come from her organization
to mine wasn’t going to come.
I was getting ready to pour some wine and watch some Netflix,
when I got off a frantic series of texts from Anne
and I could have wasted time trying to shift blame.
But I knew that I had to take ownership
because if this project did end unexpectedly,
her student was going to have to repay a semester's worth of tuition.
You know, that she’d been told was already paid for through her hard work
and she was going to lose her stipend,
which is how she pays for her living expenses.
Basically, we were about to put $15,000 worth of debt
onto a 22 year old through no fault of her own.
So I immediately assured and that I was going to solve this no matter what.
And after a couple of weeks,
we were able to resolve it without harming our working relationship.
- Much to my relief. - And mine.
But the lesson learned from my perspective
was about taking ownership.
You know, in those moments you want to react defensively
and you want to try to protect your reputation at all costs.
And I could have justified these mistakes by blaming the complex bureaucracy
and under staffing and email, junk filters, etc.
But I resisted because my relationship with Anne
means far more to me than my own ego.
(Applause)
So we both felt the pull of the fundamental attribution error,
but just knowing it existed helped us to resist it.
And our final concept is about reinterpreting emotional responses
to make more effective teams.
The one piece of advice we heard again and again
in popular media is that when you’re on a team
and you want to make yourself heard, it’s good to yell, scream
and be aggressive and really make sure
that everyone knows how much you care.
And this is really common in the technology world.
I've worked with lots of leaders
and teams that seem to thrive off this constant conflict.
But we found another way to work together,
one that doesn't involve talking over each other or yelling.
There is the occasional snowball fight. That was 1994.
(Laughter)
But our teams constantly face like looming deadlines
and seemingly insurmountable technical problems
and experimental results that point to complete failure.
So we are no strangers to this feeling of frustration and conflict.
But in those moments, we try to channel that rush of adrenaline
and stress like I’m feeling right now into positive feelings of excitement.
So we try to use that as an opportunity to tap into our diverse skills
so we can find solutions.
During the pandemic when we’re trying to figure out
how to run research remotely,
things could have gotten very heated.
So during those times when we all felt all the stress.
We tried to redirect our team meetings to make sure
that we were concentrating on the positive progress we made
and channeling a lot of stressful feelings into excitement.
And so our teams intentionally practice this reinterpretation
of emotional reactions into positive feelings versus anger.
The science of emotion does tell us that it’s not adrenaline
or any one brain chemical that is an emotion.
Rather, there’s this interpretation step
where the physiological signal is interpreted by the brain in context.
And so the same chemicals that could cause you to feel fear
while you’re on a plane and have turbulence
is going to be the same chemicals
that could cause excitement on a roller coaster.
It's that interpretation that's key.
So over time, I have really come to appreciate
the value of applying these psychological models of thinking to our work style.
It’s yet another benefit of collaborating with a psychologist.
Thanks, Anne.
In the end, we see a lot of parallels between our research
into augmented reality and our personal collaborative style.
With both the individual’s experience with the world is changed for the better.
So the technology can help you see the world in new ways,
adding in information that you wouldn’t otherwise have,
and help you focus your attention on what's really important.
And so similarly, working with a human collaborator with different skills
and different perspective can have this exponential positive impact
on performance and problem solving.
But it takes intentional work on the part of every team member
to keep these things in mind
from theory of mind to attribution of error to reinterpreting emotion.
But we know that with practice, teams can do this
and become happier, healthier and more productive.
And who wouldn't want that?
Thank you. (Applause)