Effects of Biasing Information on the Conceptual Structure of Team Communications

This study evaluated the effect of biasing information on team communication and cognition in a distributed team decision-making task. Teams received misleading or irrelevant information (control) either early or late in their information queue, and Conceptual Recurrence Analysis (CRA) was used to quantify conceptual structure in team communications. Teams in the Late condition produced a significantly greater proportion of conceptually similar utterances than teams in the Early or Control conditions. There was also a trend in the Early condition for utterances to be more conceptually similar than those in the Late condition. Additionally, the persistence of misleading information was affected by condition: teams in the Late condition were still discussing misleading information in the second half of the experiment, but teams in the Early condition were not. We take this as evidence that receiving misleading information later in the queue decreased the focus of team conversation.