Agreeing is not enough: The constructive role of miscommunication
Collaborative interaction pervades many everyday practices: work meetings, innovation and product design, education and arts. Previous studies have pointed to the central role of acknowledgement and acceptance for the success of joint action, by creating affiliation and signaling understanding.
We argue that various forms of explicit miscommunication are just as critical to challenge, negotiate and integrate individual contributions in collaborative creative activities. Through qualitative microanalysis of spontaneous coordination in collective creative LEGO constructions, we individuate
three interactional styles: inclusive, characterized by acknowledgment and praise; instructional, characterized by self-repair; and integrative, characterized by widespread self- and other-repair. We then investigate how different interaction styles leave distinct material
traces in the resulting LEGO models. The inclusive interaction style generally results in concatenations of individual contributions with little coherence and core narrative. The instructional style produces coherent, but largely individually driven models. Finally, the integrative style generates
more innovative models, synthesizing individual contributions in shared narratives or schemas.
Keywords: collaboration; creativity; distributed Cognition; miscommunication
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: 01 January 2015
- Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems
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