The importance of collective intelligence, and empathy in digital

environments@katrisaarikivi

1. The importance of collaboration and collective intelligence

2. The neuroscientific perspective to empathy

3. Collaboration and empathy in the digital realm?

1. The importance of collaboration and collective intelligence

2. The neuroscientific perspective to empathy

3. Collaboration and empathy in the digital realm?

People come together to survive and flourish.

The ability to collaborate has always been important for the human species, it is important now, and in the future, its

importance will only increase.

Zaki & Ochsner (2012) “Compared to other animals, humans are slow, small, and weak” Evolution may have favored the skills that permit cooperation.

For humans, empathy has been a survival skill, because it enables collaboration.

By Mariano - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=265811

By NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA (Mars Science Laboratory (MSL)) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

And even today, together is how we continue to attain the greatest things and solve the biggest

problems.

In the future, the importance of skills for collaboration will only increase.

In the future, humans will focus on tasks in which we are better than the "robot".

These tasks require skills in which human intelligence still surpasses the artifical. The most important of these

is empathy.

Collective intelligence best explains a team’s problem-solving capability.

How does collective intelligence emerge?

"The key to high performance lay not in the content of a team’s discussions but in the manner in which it was

communicating."Pentland, A., https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-teams

• Short speeches, no monologues

• The empathy skills of team members

• Responsiveness towards others

• Everyone gets a turn to speak

Empathy makes collaboration and collective intelligence possible.

1. The importance of collaboration and collective intelligence

2. The neuroscientific perspective to empathy

3. Collaboration and empathy in the digital realm?

EMOTIONS

THOUGHTS

ACTIONS

Zaki & Ochsner, 2012

Cognitive empathyTheory of mind

Affective empathyAltruismProsocial concern

Empathic motivation

Things that increase empathy

• Reading literary fiction (Kidd et al., 2013)• Playing Rock Band together (Martin et al., 2015)• Moving together in synchrony:

bouncing (Cirelli et al., 2014)clapping (Hove et al., 2013)

rocking in rocking chairs (Valdesolo et al., 2010)

The two-brain perspective

• The greater the extent of neural coupling between a speaker and listener, the better the understanding. Stephens et al., 2010

• Rhythmic activity of brains synchronizes during interaction. Dumas et al., 2010; Müller et al., 2013

1. The importance of collaboration and collective intelligence

2. The neuroscientific perspective to empathy and interaction

3. Collaboration and empathy in the digital realm?

We are living in a connected world.

Collective intelligence does emerge online.

And there too, empathy supports it’s emergence.

There’s just one problem…

Empathy is weaker online than in face-to-face situations.

Why?

Because digital systems are not designed to take human emotions into consideration.

As a result, the tools we have for expressing our emotions are severely lacking in quality.

And when emotional information is not transmitted, it does not touch us.

Without these signals, it becomes easy to misunderstand, and even mistreat others.

Our project NEMO focuses on creating new, better ways of transferring emotion information online and

on seeking other ways to support better online interaction and the emergence of collective

intelligence.

• basic research• content development together with professionals

working in children’s media• arranging hackathons (Emotion Hack Day) bringing

scientists and developers together to create and try out quick solutions and applications

• application development

The project combines

Research questions include:

• What is the significance of inter-brain synchronization for the success of joint problem-solving?

• Does synchronization of the brain’s oscillatory activity happen online?

• If not, could we make it happen through simultaneous brainwave entrainment?

• Could we increase emotion contagion online with the help of sensor technology / computer vision algorithms?

In one sentence, we are asking whether we could reanimate empathy in digital environments?

If we could, I believe it would improve our problem-solving abilities, and support the emergence of

more collective intelligence.

I also believe that at the moment, we need our collective intelligence perhaps more than ever.

As a species, we are still struggling for our existence on this planet. We’re still facing the same

problem as our prehistoric ancestors.

However, instead of dangerous beasts, the threats to our survival are of a completely different

magnitude.

By No machine-readable author provided. Mbz1 assumed (based on copyright claims). - No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2388690

Collective intelligence is our best shot at solving the big problems we are facing in this

time.

Empathy may yet again prove to be our most important and most powerful survival skill.

katri.saarikivi@helsinki.fi @NEMO_hki Team NEMO

emotionhackday.com @emotionhackday