Building teams for missions to Mars

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Saturday 20 April 2019 12:15PM (view full episode)

Fifty years ago Neil Armstrong became the first man to land on the Moon. Now NASA is planning missions to Mars. Astronauts will be away for almost 33 months. During this time they will be subjected to altered gravity and radiation, the effects of which are well understood. But what about isolation and confinement? The journey takes 8 months. And there’s no welcoming party when you arrive. What types of personalities work best together? How will astronauts cope with a 40-minute delay as they communicate back to Earth? This discussion from the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington DC in February reveals results of research into isolation and how humans could be expected to react to a 33-month mission with no option of turning back.

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Robyn Williams: Going to Mars, how to select those who could cope with the unbelievable pressure. Let's join a press conference at the AAAS, with psychologists, anthropologists and NASA chiefs, to see what needs to be done. First, Noshir Contractor from Northwestern University.

Noshir Contractor: So as we consider all the science and engineering that is going to be required for us to get to Mars, one of the big challenges that we have to face is that there is one particular object that we have no control over engineering and designing, and that is the human body, and that has been the case for the human body and has been a challenge for the space movement for a while. We have spent centuries looking into ways in which we can understand the manual for the human body, how it works. In the last century we have also made a lot of progress in writing the repair manual for when the human body does not work.

In the last few decades we have begun to write a manual for how the human body works in light of the different hazards that they face in space. These hazards are well understood in terms of things like radiation, gravity fields and so on. It's only in the last decade or so that we have begun to write the manual and, dare I say, take baby steps in writing the repair manual for the social impacts that accompany humans who are going into space. And so today what you're going to hear are the first findings of research that has actually happened and moved away from speculation, either by experts or by science fiction writers, to actually looking at what we know about from a scientific fact about space.

You might ask the question, and in fact I was asked this question yesterday by a reporter; are you saying that we actually have sent people to asteroids? And the answer is no, we have not. And so the question then is how could we know and how could we make scientific insights about it? Well, it would be nice if we could have a human petri dish where we could put people into a small confined area, isolate them for long periods of time, and physiologically and psychologically prod them 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But wait, we actually do have a human petri dish. It's called Human Exploration Research Analogue that is based at the Johnson Space Centre.

In fact we have many human petri dishes. This would not have been allowed as scientific studies in a lab, in a research university. Since the days of Zimbardo and others, human subjects issues would have prevented us from doing this kind of research, but now in the context of space flight, whether it is HERA, the Human Exploration Research Analogue at the Johnson Space Centre, HI-SEAS in Hawaii, the Chinese have their own, Space Palace as they call it, the Japanese have their own facility as well. And so we are learning a lot about…what we are going to hear today are results that are based on observations and studies that we've conducted in these human petri dishes.

I'm going to focus on three quick findings here and then hand things over to the rest of our panel. Some of the research that we've begun to do in this context is to ask about what is the right team that would go to Mars? Remember that going to Mars is about a nine-month trip. You have to stay there for about a year before you can get back into the position where you could be slung back to Earth again in nine months. So we are talking about a three-year trip without any exit strategy for the team of four to six people that might come from different cultures, different nationalities.

And so one of the first questions that we asked ourselves is 'the right stuff' that Tom Wolfe wrote about when referring to the Mercury astronauts John Glenn and Alan Shepard, among others, is that right stuff still the right stuff for a team that would go to Mars? And I think we are pretty confident that it is not. So what we have done instead is we have built computer-based models that predict how well people would work in space. And we have findings from these models that are quite encouraging in terms of how we can predict how well people would do in this.

For example, how will they get along with each other? We do a really good job of being able to predict that, taking a model built on one mission, applying it to a brand-new mission. We don't do so well when it comes to figuring out who doesn't get along very well with others, and part of it is simply we have less data points on that. So while it's good for HERA that these people get along mostly, only a few don't get along, we on the other hand from a science point of view would like more people not to get along during our dataset so that we can better understand and predict those issues.

We have also taken models that were built for 30-day missions and applied it and seen that we are able to predict and project to 45-day missions based on the data we collected in 30-day missions from previous years. And most importantly we find that having gotten this data from a few missions, we are already doing pretty well in terms of predicting future missions, and so we don't need to continue to collect a lot more new data in order to be able to make these models more effective. What I would say is that, just like weather forecasting, we are not just describing what's happening in HERA, we are predicting what will happen and we are also beginning to prescribe and mitigate against what should be changed if we see something bad is happening. Weather forecasts typically stops at simply telling you how cold it's going to be in Chicago and not doing very much about it. Our computer models are geared to see what we can do to pre-empt a potential team issue.

And in closing I will just add one more thing. We are also very interested in understanding shared mental models in space, and that is to say we've all heard of groupthink, that when people get really close to each other, that could sometimes be a problem. We have instances that we have studied where in a situation where like in most crew missions we know that when people are put into isolated environments they do three things: they either start pointing fingers at other crew members that they don't like, they collectively point fingers to mission control as a team from space, or the most dangerous and the most depressing, literally, is sometimes they point fingers at themselves. So we need to find ways in which we can understand the optimal shared mental model.

And there I am very happy to report that we took an example from history of the Skylab mission. Some of you may remember that there was a work slowdown on Skylab 4 in December around Christmas time 1973, and they essentially went 'on strike'. That's not really the word that NASA likes but they turned off radio communications with NASA ground control, spent time at relaxing and looking at the Earth, and only before resuming communication with NASA after this period of hiatus.

What we did was we looked at all the text that was communicated before and during that Skylab mission as well as the other Skylab missions that preceded it, and we were able to find with a high level of accuracy that we could have predicted the slowdown, we could have predicted that this was likely to happen, just based on the conversations that happened amongst the crew members and with the crew members and mission control.

So with the power of computational models and text analytics, what we are doing to help, understand and anticipate challenges for teams in space, that you are going to hear from the rest of our colleagues, will at the end of it all help us improve the quality and the effectiveness of teams back here on Earth. And in that sense we are upholding a tradition that what NASA does in space comes back to benefit us back on Earth. And all of these techniques that you're going to hear about today have not been actually conducted on teams on Earth for the most part, but we are excited that these methodologies will have huge spillover effects in organisational contexts. Thank you.

Leslie DeChurch: Good morning, I'm Leslie DeChurch, Professor at Northwestern in Communication and Psychology. And I want to get you to conjure an image for a moment. Thinking back on some of the great successes in the space program, the images that you think of likely involve people and they involve teamwork and collaboration. And behind the awesome robots and rockets and technologies and the maths and the other technical innovations, there are people, and there are people that come together and set aside their individual self-interest to accomplish something that is greater than what they are individually capable of doing. And that's the essence of teamwork.

Now, if I ask you to think about prior successes, like what it took to get three men in Apollo 11, or think back to Apollo 13 and what it took to get three men safely back on Earth, you're probably thinking about extraordinary teamwork that happened inside a mission control centre, where literally hundreds of people could work on troubleshooting, planning and running an operation remotely from Earth. That was the Moon.

Mars is 200 times, on a good day or on a good orbital cycle, further than the Moon, and it's a million times harder in terms of complexity. So when we go to Mars there won't be hundreds of great minds completely running the mission and troubleshooting the problems that we know are likely to happen, and the problems that will happen that we don't know. Instead, there will be four to 24 individuals that will only have each other. They will also be operating as a team, troubleshooting a lot of problems that can't be anticipated, under what we would all consider to be extreme levels of sensory deprivation. They will look at the same walls, they will eat the same food, they will look outside at the same darkness, and they will only have each other for any type of variability in their stimulus.

Despite these challenges, there's no shortage of people who dream of signing on to this team. So the question that we ask in our research is what happens to team performance in these conditions of extreme sensory deprivation? So the findings that I'm going to share today will show the stories of nine four-person analogue space crews that gave up 30 to 45 days of their lives to live under these same conditions so that we could study what happens to their social interaction. Not only did they live in isolation and confinement in an analogue, but they spent approximately 30% of their time experiencing what we call extreme communication delay, meaning that between 30 seconds and five minutes one way was the fastest that they could have any communication go beyond just the other three crew members that were inside their habitat.

And so to my question of what happens to team performance, I have some good news and I have some bad news. So let's start with the good news. In the team space we study a concept called collective intelligence, which is comprised of four things that successful teams need to be capable of doing. One, they need to make decisions. Two, they need to be able to execute tasks. Three, they need to be able to negotiate and resolve conflicts, and fourth, they need to be able to generate and create new ideas and solutions.

So, back to the good news. The nine teams that we studied all showed improvements on what we would call behavioural dimensions of collective performance. That is, their ability to time, coordinate, sequence psychomotor activities improved. But let's talk a little bit about the bad news. As the teams remained in isolation and confinement for longer periods of time, their performance on what we call conceptual domains of performance, their ability to think together, to combine expertise, to solve problems creatively declined with increasing time in isolation. Importantly, this is exactly what autonomy is going to necessitate of these future brave space explorer teams. They will be the ones who will have to autonomously carry out creative thinking, problem solving and decision making with minimal assistance or at best remote assistance from teams back on Earth. So the collective intelligence has to be on board.

Furthermore, these findings also show that there are periods of peak crew intelligence and periods of problematic crew intelligence. We find that in these missions, the second quarter, around mission days 14 to 17, which is right before and at the beginning of the onset of the communication delay, that's when these teams are at their peak performance, they are doing quite well on all of these dimensions of collective functioning.

However, as they continue on the com delay, getting to the reintegration back off com delay and where they are on their hypothetical re-approach to Earth, around days 30 to 34, that's the teamwork danger zone, that's where we see that their problem-solving abilities, their ability to make high-quality decisions using disparate expertise declines. So this third quarter is one that we have to paid particular attention to in planning these missions and equipping these crews. And with that I look forward to talking to you in the Q&A.

Jeffrey Johnson: Hi, I'm Jeff Johnson from the University of Florida, Department of Anthropology. So I'm an anthropologist and so what I liked doing is actually going somewhere and doing the research in the place, doing participant observation. What got me interested in this whole notion of groups in isolation was I worked in Alaska for two salmon seasons in Bristol Bay as a boat carpenter doing participant observation research, and I observed some really interesting social dynamics in the fish camp I worked in, which was a very isolated place. It turns out that every year the fishermen have a strike, and during that strike it's very tense because they're losing about $10,000 a day. But what I observed was one of the fishermen emerged as what I called the court jester in the fish camp, and they had a lot of humour surrounding him, and it released the tension during the strike. After the strike was over with his role disappeared and actually he was rewarded later on with over-limit fish, so his role as this court jester was rewarded, but it kept the group cohesive.

So I got interested in this and I worked with an anthropologist named Ben Finney who did a book on Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience and he got me interested in Antarctica as a place where I could study these informal role properties and emergent properties in groups. So I spent 10 years studying group dynamics at polar research stations, including South Pole Station, the Russian Vostok Station, the Polish Arctowski Station, Chinese Great Wall Station, and the Indian station.

This is Adolf Lindstrøm, he was the cook on Amundsen's polar expedition. And in Amundsen's diary, this is a quote from his diary in 1911: 'He has rendered greater and more valuable services to the Norwegian polar expedition than any other man.' And this is the cook, and he is quite a robust…I don't want to use another word that would be an insult, but he was quite a robust man in terms of body size. He was always laughing, he was jovial, he was a good spirited, he was dispassionate, he was unbiased. And he was the one person who whenever there was a problem, whenever there was tension, he would actually be the person, through his humour and through his social intelligence he was the one who was actually able to relieve the tensions.

So when I was reading all these polar expeditions I started thinking about these things in terms of these informal role properties and the emergent properties of groups and whether or not we were finding them. And we did find them in Amundsen's group. Less so in Scott's group, and there were some in Shackleton's group.

This is actually a network from the South Pole Station from one year, I did three years there studying small group dynamics. This is the network of the group that did the best in terms of higher morale and individual psychological well-being. It's not just that there are these clown or entertainer roles, there are a number of informal roles that emerge. And you know, any group you've been in, there's somebody who brings with them certain characteristics like good leadership skills or a good organisational skills or things like that. So there are these informal roles that people bring like expressive leadership or social director, like instrumental leadership or a work leader. There are storytellers that are part of this, as well as these entertainers and clowns.

So what you'll notice here is that I point out that there are…these people were nominated by the group in terms of these informal social roles, and there are three expressive leaders. All of them were women, all of them organised events like dinner parties, sporting events, things like that that brought people together, that created greater cohesion in the group. And you'll notice that the clown is the most central figure in the group. He was a very funny human being. He was very smart. In fact when we look at his knowledge, we collected cognitive social structures, he actually knew exactly what the group looked like, he was very, very cognisant of how people were connected and in what way, and he used that. He was both seen as a storyteller and he actually was the bridge between the scientists and the tradespeople. He was actually a carpenter and a plumber. So he brought these people together and created a cohesive group.

In the other groups that didn't do as well at the South Pole, they lacked these informal social roles, in particular they lacked them in the right combinations. So the question becomes one…we've seen this now in a variety of different locations. I've crossed the Russian, Polish, Chinese and Indian stations, we see very similar kinds of phenomena, and the question is how do these things scale? These groups would be anywhere between 10 and 28 in Antarctica. How do these kinds of phenomena that we observed in these other kinds of isolated environments, how do they scale to a group of four people in these kinds of simulated environments? And it turns out that they do. What we find is that of the four missions I've done in-depth analysis of in terms of the mission viability, the more that there was these informal social roles emerge, the better the mission did in terms of viability. And what I mean by viability are things like we asked people would they be willing to go on a three-year Mars mission with one another. So the more that you say that you'd want to go on a Mars mission with somebody, the more viable the group is. So the higher the density of those kinds of nominations of people, the better the group was doing. And also in terms of reciprocity, who enjoy working with.

So we have these independent measures of whether or not the group is getting along, and it turns out that there were storytellers and other kinds of informal social roles that emerged that made the groups work well. And the groups that didn't work well, they didn't have them. In particular is the isomorphism between informal leadership and formal leadership. So the more that the mission commander was also nominated as the informal leader, the better the group did. And so it's hopeful that these things now can apply when we do analysis of additional four to five missions that this will still hold up.

Steve Kozlowski: I am Steve Kozlowski. So what I want to do with my short five minutes here is tell you why we did this work, how we did it, what the key findings are that I'm going to report today, and where it goes, what's next. So you've got a lot of the why already. This is a new phase of human space exploration for NASA that we are beginning to embark upon. I think it's really interesting that it's 50 years ago later this year that NASA first put somebody on the moon, Neil Armstrong, and now we are getting poised to begin interplanetary space travel to Mars.

This is the kind of experience that we describe as ICE: people are going to be isolated, they going to be confined and it's going to be under extreme conditions. It's a 32- to 33-month mission, 8.5 months out, 8.5 months back, the balance exploring the surface. And think about it, you're going to be in a confined space, you going to have very little privacy. Once you're on Mars, communication back and forth is a 40-minute round trip, so you're not going to be having a conversation with ground control or with friends and family, you going to be self-contained, it's a completely immersive experience. So the four to six people that comprise the mission, that's your social world for nearly three years. Once they close the door, that's it.

So there's a very real question here; what happens to team functioning? Jeff described it as team cohesion, the glue that bonds members together around each other, as well as the mission that they are trying to accomplish. Scientists have been studying team cohesion since the 1950s, so almost 70 years. And we know that team cohesion is related to team effectiveness, it's an important contributor. But what we don't know is what happens to cohesion over long periods of time under these ICE conditions. Most of the data is static. Cohesion and outcomes are collected essentially at the same time, and so we don't know how it plays out over long periods of time, particularly under this persistent danger and stress, and that's something that NASA needs to know. What happens to it, and if it does have the potential to break down and jeopardise mission effectiveness, what can we do to support it so that crew members are able to manage it over this long duration?

So what are we doing to research this? So essentially there's two basic questions here. What happens to cohesion over long periods of time under ICE conditions? And the second is, can we capture it in some fashion, can we capture some information about team functioning that we can use to help support it? So we have a technology development component and we have a simple…I call it benchmarking research, what happened. So for the benchmarking side we collect data in the Antarctic because it's kind of the ultimate ICE environment. But it's also because we can't study astronauts, there aren't enough of them and they are oversubscribed, so we look for analogue settings, the Antarctic is a good one. And there are also dedicated NASA mission simulations.

So Leslie and Nosh were describing the HERA facility at the Johnson Space Centre where you have teams for anywhere from one to six weeks, so different durations for four-person teams. And we also study folks in a facility called HI-SEAS which is a six-person crew perched on the side of Mt Mauna Loa on a big Island of Hawaii. And those teams of six go through an eight- to 12-month mission, so much longer duration, and actually much more informative about what happens to cohesion under persistent stress.

For benchmarking we use a methodology called experience sampling, which is a really fancy way of saying they answer really short, focused questionnaires at the end of the day, do a little bit of journaling, answer questions about cohesion perceptions and conflicts and things of that sort. And on the technology side, this is with my engineering colleague Subir Biswas, we have a sensor platform, sensor technology that detects the presence of others, so basically sampling interactions. There are other sensors on the platform, so we get some physiological indicators. But the basic design concept is to be able to see who you are interacting with and how well those interactions are going and to infer how well the team is doing, how is it functioning, and then to be able to deliver information or feedback back to people to help them manage their social relationships, because it's not going to be ground control.

So what have we learned? So I'm basically going to be talking about our findings in the HI-SEAS facility for teams that have been working together in isolation for more than six months. And what we see in the beginning is that if you're looking at cohesion, so higher is better than lower, we are more cohesive, and the thing about team constructs is that people need to be in agreement. If they are in agreement we can treat it as a property of the team. If they have very different points of view, then it's not a property of the team, you just have a breakdown.

In the beginning, cohesion is high and everyone is consensual about it. And then somewhere in the four- to seven-month range, one or a couple of people will begin to de synchronise from the rest of the team. And then it begins to contage to the rest of the team members, and by the end of the mission, cohesion is all over the place, it has completely broken down, you don't have a cohesive team anymore. And we've seen this happen in every of those missions that are in excess of six months. So two 8-month and one 12-month mission, the same basic pattern; cohesion breaks down. So there's a reason to be concerned.

With respect to the technology, we have laboratory data where we validated the accuracy of the technology and our ability to infer affective reactions to interactions. I'm not going to present that data here. I am going to present what we've collected again in HI-SEAS. So for these teams that have shown cohesion breakdowns, I'll show that the technology is able to capture essentially the same information that we get from the self-reports. So that means it's viable to be able to use this kind of sensor platform as a way to be able to help monitor the team and potentially give them the information they need to manage those relationships.

So what's next? We know there's a problem, we know we can capture it with the technology, so the next step is really building this support system. So right now this technology will distribute the raw information to any android enabled device in real time. You can actually see the data. But it's not very interpretable. Unless you're a psychologist, you don't know, what do I do with this? So what we need to do is to build out the algorithms and the software backbone to be able to collect the data in real time, draw inferences about team status, process that, and then feed it back to the team in an ingestible form, in an informative way in which members can use that information to help manage their relationships. For us to do that we need the cooperation and involvement of NASA operations, obviously NASA astronauts, the people who are going to be using this kind of technology, to build out and customise exactly how we provide the information back. So hopefully NASA will be interested in continuing to fund the research and bring it to closure so we can help support astronauts on a long-duration mission to Mars. Thank you.

Tom Williams: Thank you, I'm Tom Williams, I am the element scientist for the human factors and behavioural performance in the human research program at Johnson Space Centre. As you've heard with our distinguished team today, NASA has sponsored the research, we focus on the team risk as one of the 32 different risks that we've identified for human spaceflight in exploration missions. So we consider this one of our high risk, meaning that we expect that we've got to get some type of countermeasures, some kind of preventative strategy in place before we can go on the long-duration mission. And you've heard various aspects of that reflected in each of the presenters.

We've first got to be able to identify what makes a functioning team? We got to be able to monitor that team as it progresses along the time period of a long-duration mission in what we consider five spaceflight hazards; in an altered gravity environment, in a radiated environment from space radiation, in an isolated and confined environment, which you've heard we use analogues to go after that portion of it, but also a closed hostile environment where the crew will be exposed to carbon dioxide, various other stressors just from the environment itself, just the habitat in which they live, the lighting, the circadian rhythm that may come about. And then all of those come together basically in a human system.

And the team, as they are stressed by these various spaceflight hazards, will have to find ways to get along, and that's where the countermeasures that you heard referenced will be so important to us; how can we intervene at the right time? We have high-functioning, highly skilled crew, and the last thing you want to do is try to force something on them when they don't need it. So how do you know exactly the right time to deliver the countermeasure? And that's part of what this valuable research does. So with that, I know as a member of the team that's assembled here today, I know you're here to ask questions of the distinguished team, so I'll turn it back to our moderator. Thank you.

Robyn Williams: You're listening to The Science Show on RN, and a press conference from the AAAS, surviving a trip to Mars.

Moderator: Great, thank you so much everyone, we'll take questions now. Well start up here. And kindly state your name and affiliation before you ask your question.

Question: Hi there, Ivan Semeniuk with The Globe and Mail. I am curious if any of these experiments, like with HERA and HI-SEAS and so on, if all these experiments involved US nationals only or if people have plans for international teams, because I think we are potentially looking at an international crew at some future point and Canadians are always expecting they are going to partner with someone else.

Noshir Contractor: I could talk about some of the things we are doing and then others can chime in as well. HERA has only up to this point had US nationals. However, we have also been funded through NASA to work with the Russians who have a facility in Moscow as part of the Institute for Behavioural Medical Problems, IBMP, it's kind of an odd name but they are the ones who do all the space work. They have a facility there called the NEK, and the Russians have been collecting data there, it's called the Mars-500, so they collected data for people who were in there for a really long period of time, and that was an international crew. It did not end well. There were some problems. Unfortunately for you one of the chief protagonists of the problem was a Canadian woman, and the other one was a Japanese. So yes, we have access to some of that archival data.

We did not instrument Mars-500 but we do have access to some of the ways in which the Russians get to some of the same issues about team states that we are talking about here today. We are in fact also launching a research project, again as part of the US–Russia collaboration called SIRIUS, and that is going to be an international mission called the NEK mission. That launches in about four weeks I think or thereabouts, and there we are in fact collecting data from that. It includes a US person but it also includes people from Russia as well as I think some other countries as well. That's in Moscow. It's in the same facility that was used for the Mars-500, it's called the NEK mission. We call the project the NEK project but it's part of the US–Russia SIRIUS collaboration. So the tagline is; the US and Russia are getting serious about space.

Steve Kozlowski: So the HI-SEAS mission, people were collected to be international. So I can't say for sure that every single mission has had an international representation, but the ones in which we collected data, missions two through five, I believe there was at least one, usually a couple of people who were international, a deliberate attempt to try to have a fairly diverse crew in that respect.

At the end of the day, I think it was Jeff who was talking about it, it's sometimes really difficult, one of the key blindspots…I mean, we've been studying team effectiveness since the '50s, and one of the hardest things to study in that is composition of crew. People differ on a wide variety of characteristics. I've got personality, value, demographics, my race, my gender, my age, et cetera. So there are literally many, many things that could be important. It's very difficult to systematically vary those things and then talk about duration. So the science just doesn't exist on composition, that's why the computational modelling that Leslie and Noshir are doing is going to be insightful not just for NASA but for team effectiveness in general because this is a basic problem for organisations. But I would say the factors that are most meaningful I think are less likely to be where are you from, a cultural characteristic, and something more about who are you as a person, what's your personality like and how does that fit with the other folks who comprise the mission. Those other things that show up as, whoa, there's a surprise.

Leslie DeChurch: And I'll just add a few anecdotes to that. One is going back to the Mars-500 mission. We were fortunate enough to interview one of the Mars-500 astronauts as we were starting our project. He said one of the challenges was communicating. A lot of the crew members were Russian, and so they would revert back and have a lot of communication in Russian. But then as soon as I asked him about the com delay he sort of laughed and said it's much easier to speak Russian than it is try to talk to Earth on a com delay. So that kind of frames out this autonomy issue. But like I said, we are looking forward to collecting the SIRIUS data which has four Russians, including a cosmonaut who has been in flight, and two American participants in that analogue.

Tom Williams: And I'll just add that we use ground analogues in anticipation of moving that to flight. So once we validate something on the ground, we then move it to the International Space Station and we all know we have great partnerships with the International Space Station and that gives us some of what you've asked about, great partnerships with the Canadians on that.

Jeffrey Johnson: Just a quick comment. One of the tendencies in groups (I'm a network researcher) is the tendency towards homophily, and homophily is birds of a feather flock together. So the tendency is if you're Russian you want to be with a Russian, if you're American you're with American, if you're a scientist with a scientist, if you're a tradesperson with a tradesperson.

The one example I showed you of that one person who was the entertainer, he was the one person who brought all the group together to create a cohesive group that reflected no homophily. I've seen other groups that broke into homophilous subgroups. And so the tendency is for that homophily to have formed these subgroups, and the question is how do you put people together in composition. That doesn't happen, so it's a tendency for that not to happen. You want heterophily, not the homophily.

Question: Hi, I'm Alan Boyle with GeekWire. I was hoping to slide in two kind of related questions. One was you mentioned the Skylab experience and being able to predict when there might be a breakdown or a strike. That suggests that there might be an AI program that does textual analysis to figure that out. How far have you gotten on that, and is it something that perhaps people could try out? I imagine that could be offered online if people wanted to see if they were compatible.

And then Tom mentioned being able to intervene if there is something that looks like it's heading for a breakdown, and so I'd love to hear more details on how that happens. You hear these stories about astronauts who feel like they want to get out of the space station and have to be restrained. There have been apocryphal stories about that sort of thing. So anything you can talk about mitigating or heading off crises in space, that would be interesting.

Noshir Contractor: What we have been doing is built machine learning models where we extract features of the text, sentiments et cetera from that text and use that as predictors of what was happening within this context, so at least look at the trajectory of how those things change over time.

We also look not just at the text features but even something as simple as structural features. How often if I send a message to you, with what latency do you reply back to me? To what extent do we engage in triangular structures, in networks we call these triads? And what we have found is that when you take all of these different structural features of the kind we call network signatures, or text analytic features, both do a really good job of predicting what is happening within this context, though surprisingly to us the network signatures actually were more robust than even the text analytics were, which is not to discount it but to say back on Earth where people may be concerned about privacy of looking at the actual text, people think that the network signatures is more a metadata, and if that is going to be able to predict it, that might actually be more viable in more organisational contexts back on Earth.

In terms of the mitigation you addressed to Tom, I just will say something, Tom is somebody who has really challenged us on that issue and I'm curious to hear what Tom has to say on it. But one of the things we are doing right now actually in a HERA mission that started two days ago is we have been able to manipulate who gets to work with whom on a task. And so we built a model before the entire mission, identified where there would be pain points between certain dyads. And not only did we anticipate it but we have now injected into what they call their playbook, which is actually their task schedule, who is working with whom, we've actually injected who should work with whom, with the anticipation that that would actually help mitigate these issues. Intuitively you would say if two people don't get along, maybe they need a cooling-off period and not work together. Or two, they need a period where they work together on something they are really good at, so that successes will bring bonds. Or third, that they will be brought together to work with a third person that they both like, the clown in Jeff's example, so that clown might give them a chance to bring them together. So those are some of the strategies we are using.

Leslie DeChurch: And one thing I just want to add to that. I think Noshir's point goes back to something Steve Kozlowski said a second ago, which is team composition is really hard computationally. And he also mentioned in his findings that the team doesn't all fall apart at once, it's a slow cycle of a dyad or a person coming out of line and then everyone else in the team starts to see their perspective. Yeah, we are broken, and they start having different perspectives. And I think this kind of modelling and this countermeasure that Noshir is talking about is really aimed at identifying what the weak spots are, which is a computationally easier problem, and finding these really high compatible dyads that can do the closely coupled work, and these dyads that are likely to be much more problematic. And given the international crew and the fact that it's unlikely any single space agency or private entity is going to get to select the whole crew, that these kind of dyadic interventions might be a particularly useful strategy.

Steve Kozlowski: And I would add my team…our participants journal, they fill out questionnaires, but they also do open-ended things. IBM Watson, you can access this yourself on the web, you get a little account, we submit the journals, and you can get from that…extract directed sentiments. So just by looking at the kinds of things that people write at the end of the day, who they are happy with and who they are not happy with, you can identify basically the frictions that Noshir is talking about.

And the technology that I'm talking about where we are able to detect what's going on, essentially what happens is we are looking at your interactions or your propensity to interact with someone else and turning that into network type data, and that's basically what we are using to replicate or predict the same kind of reactions that people provide from their questionnaire responses just from the batch data. And those dyadic interaction patterns are really telling you about basically what's happening at the substructure of the group, where the fractures are forming.

Tom Williams: So in our team risk we recognised there's got to be cooperation, coordination, communication, but there is a fourth component that we really focus on and that's psychological adaptation, that psychosocial adaptation. And there's an old saying in psychology; good mental health is not the absence of conflict but how you handle the conflict. So part of what we have to get to is what are those intervention strategies, given at the right time. Currently on station they have private psychological conferences every two weeks that allows for that discharge of any issue to be discussed that need it. But you have people they get training before they go into those environments so that they can be prevented. But human nature being what it is, you can't prevent everything, so you give skills and strategies on how to reduce the tension when it arises, and that's what part of the research helps us to identify when the right time to deliver the right strategy is. They get training on that. Number one, self-awareness. Know when you're about to react, and then here are some strategies to keep you from reacting in a way that may diminish that cooperation or coordination of reactions.

Leslie DeChurch: And one of our collaborators who is not on the panel, Suzanne Bell at DePaul, actually did a training like this that is intended to teach the crew some self-relationship skills, and she implemented that last week at Johnson Space Centre.

Question: Thank you very much, my name is Alok Jha from The Economist. For you Noshir, I was curious about you said that there were certain relationships and network affects between people that predicted good and bad outcomes. I wonder if you could you give me a couple of examples of the kinds of network affects. And Jeffrey and Tom, I wonder, from your work, does it imply that when you are building a team to go to Mars you need a comedy character, like you specifically need that, you're going to recruit for that? Because it sounds like a really important person to have on your team.

Noshir Contractor: Yes, I think the encouraging thing about the network question that he said…so the first one that we looked at was simple reciprocity, that is the extent to which people would reply to one another and that would be the simple structure. We then went further and saw that it was not just a question of reciprocity but it was how quick the reciprocal relationship happened. So if you send me an email and I reply to you in a week, that's good. But if you send me an email and I reply to you in an hour, that is much, much better and a much better predictor of the kind of tie.

The second one that we found was this triatic structure that I mentioned, and there are two types of triatic structure. I could talk to you, you could talk to somebody else and then I could talk to that person as the boss of the boss. Or it could be a closed cycle where we all talk to each other, and it is the latter which is referred to as a cyclical relationship where each of these people are engaging in cycles, so there is no hierarchy where one talks to this person, this person talks to the other, but they all talk to each other, and that cyclical triad is a very strong predictor of positive affect ties amongst individuals.

Jeffrey Johnson: One of the problems here is that I've done work with 15 Antarctic stations, three of which were at the South Pole Station, the rest were Polish, Chinese, Indian and Russian. Without having lots of variability, and Steve was talking about the HI-SEAS, that they tended to have problems all the time, fortunately for me at the South Pole Station I had three years of really different variability. There was one year where there was no comedian or no person that was the entertainer, there was one expressive leader who dropped out at the end and the group split into subgroups, like Steve experienced I think in the research they were doing.

The one I showed you here was somebody who, like Lindstrøm, was well liked by the group, he had high social intelligence, he could read people, and he had humour, and that humour brought people together, it created this really cohesive group, with the addition of other people like the expressive leaders who organised events that meant more face-to-face contact people had the better they did. So I have observed in groups where these things emerge and the group does well. I've observed where they haven't emerged and there hasn't been the right combination of these informal properties in terms of the composition, and the group doesn't do well.

And what we are seeing a little bit in the HERA data is that there is more of these other kinds of roles like storyteller and other things and peacemaker and less so the humour. I've only had four observations, so it's going to be interesting to see when I start analysing more data the extent to which humour matters over the long term. But I think it really is something that's critical. It was critical in Amundsen's case, and it turns out that Johansen was the only person that was pushed on Amundsen because he was Nansen's right-hand man, and if he wanted to get the ship to go to Antarctica he had needed to have Johansen, and Johansen was the one that almost created the problem in terms of competition for informal leader. And in many cases Lindstrøm helped during the winter to actually relieve tensions between many of the crew.

Tom Williams: I don't know that the research really leads us to a conclusion that we must select someone in a crew of four, but clearly the research demonstrates that humour used at the right time…anybody in a relationship knows humour used at the right time can discharge a lot of tension that may have built up because of interactions. So that's what we want to focus on now. I don't know that we've got enough to point to we need someone selected only on that characteristic, but we certainly need someone who has got that ability to use it at the right time and in the right way for the right reason.

Jeffrey Johnson: Yes, and Lindstrøm was a great cook, not just…

Tom Williams: Right, exactly.

Steve Kozlowski: I would add that the research that we've done, this isn't about humour, it's about what psychologists would call positive affectivity. So there are some people who tend to view the world through a somewhat negative lens, and people who view the world through a more positive lens. And generally speaking positive affectivity acts as a kind of buffer so that people can absorb more stress before it begins to bubble out into some kind of reactive behaviour, at least that's what we've seen in some of the questionnaire data that we've collected in the different analogue environments.

Noshir Contractor: We also looked at personality characteristics that can affect who likes whom, and our models show a very interesting pattern, that people who have a highly conscientious personality, who score high in conscientiousness, often tend to be viewed as a hindrance, or disliked by other members of the crew, and that that effect is more common in situations where they have low performance rather than high performance. In other words, when a group is not performing at a high level, they are likely to look at someone who has been conscientious and think of that person as a hindrance because that person is nagging them potentially to get things done.

Robyn Williams: Noshir Contractor from Northwestern University. And also from there we had Leslie DeChurch, a psychologist. Jeffrey Johnson is an anthropologist from the University of Florida. Steve Kozlowski from Michigan State University. And Tom Williams from NASA and the Johnson Space Centre. They were at the AAAS in Washington DC.


Noshir Contractor
Professor of Behavioural Sciences
Northwestern University
Evanston IL USA
Leslie DeChurch
Professor of Communications Studies
Northwestern University
Evanston IL USA
Jeffrey Johnson
Professor of Anthropology
University of Florida
Gainesville FL USA
Steve Kozlowski
Professor of Organizational Psychology
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI USA
Tom Williams
Johnson Space Center


Robyn Williams
David Fisher

Comments (1)

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  • V La May :

    21 Apr 2019 11:12:30am

    No mention of the elephant in the room with regard to group dynamics: sex. As to be expected from those earnest, puritanical Yanks. I kept hoping Robyn would ask about sex, but no. (Maybe the questions had to be submitted ahead of time & some were censored?)