Working in pairs may not improve performance

The idea that “two heads are better than one” may not always be the case, according to two Wharton professors.

In a recent study, Wharton professors Julia Minson and Jennifer Mueller discovered that people who work in pairs to make judgments and calculate answers do not necessarily perform significantly better than those who work individually. Their findings were published in the March edition of Psychological Science, an Association for Psychological Science journal.

“When people make a decision together, they are less likely to include the views of outside people,” Minson said. “The reason is because people are more confident when making decisions with others.”

Minson and Mueller conducted the study in August 2011 through the Wharton Behavioral Lab. The pool of participants consisted of mostly Penn students, as well as some community members.

In order to test their hypothesis, Minson and Mueller created a model in which participants answered a variety of questions in different rounds and periodically compared them to their peers’ responses.

“Participants had to make guesses on business statistics and demographics, either working by themselves or with partners,” Minson said. “In the first round they made their guesses, and then they got to compare them to the answers from someone else.”

Minson added that people who came up with their answers as a pair were far less likely than people who worked by themselves to adjust their responses when given the opportunity to do so.

“It didn’t seem to matter if the input they were getting was from pairs or alone,” Minson explained. “The pairs repeated that they were more comfortable with their judgments.”

For Minson, the most surprising aspect of the study was simply the results.

“We thought the pairs would be a lot more accurate because ‘two heads are better than one,’ but it turned out that the pairs were only slightly more accurate,” she said.

Engineering freshman David Kim agreed that working in pairs may be marginally beneficial compared to working individually, but stressed the importance of actually knowing your partner.

“I think if you build a good relationship and you have trust with the other person, by working with them you will probably be able to accomplish a lot more than by yourself,” he said. “But if you’re working with a stranger, you won’t have that relationship so you might as well be working by yourself.”

Similarly, College senior Madeleine Macks believes the idea that “two heads are better than one” may not always be the case.

“I don’t think it always holds true, but it can,” she said. “It holds true for trivia or questions you aren’t prepared for because you can think about it and talk about it with others.”

Even after conducting their research, Minson views the concept of collaboration as a work in progress.

“The idea is that collaboration is a tool, but I still think it is a largely misunderstood tool,” she said. “The fact that people in the real world don’t collaborate in a way that is most effective … is a research strain.”

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