The Echo Chambers of Complexity: How Task Complexity Influences Team Groupthink and Individual Exploration

Abstract

Effective teamwork and problem-solving in dynamic environments necessitate a balanced approach between exploration, the pursuit of novel solutions, and exploitation, the utilization of existing knowledge. This paper delves into the strategic behaviors individuals adopt in response to varying problem complexities within a team setting, as part of a pre-registered experimental study in a controlled laboratory environment. Participants engaged in a sequential search problem on a rugged performance landscape, modeled using the NK framework, to investigate the impact of problem complexity on individual and collective decision-making strategies. Our results demonstrate that, on average, exploitation, defined as relying on the team's knowledge, predominates over exploration-relying on independent search. Crucially, we find that individuals adapt their behavior in response to complexity in a direction opposite to what would enhance team performance, becoming more exploitative as complexity increases. However, significant behavioral heterogeneity was observed in individual adaptation strategies, indicating the presence of individual types whose adaptation could in fact benefit group performance. These more exploratory individuals typically underestimate the complexity of tasks. By integrating experimental results with Agent-Based Modeling, our study shows that while the presence of more exploratory individuals enhances team performance in complex environments, their individual scores are, on average, lower than those of less exploratory agents. This reveals a complexity-driven social dilemma in balancing exploration and exploitation. It also highlights that complexity underestimators, who exhibit a more exploratory attitude, are crucial to team performance at the expense of their individual performance.

Keywords: Collective Intelligence, Team Behavior, Exploration and Exploitation, NK Landscape, Social Dilemma