Business Meetings Are Making You Dumb

Group settings, such as business meetings, can actually diminish intelligence, according to a new study from Virginia Tech's Carilion School of Medicine and Research Institute.

Research suggests that small-group dynamics such as jury deliberations, meetings and even cocktail parties can have a negative intellectual effect on participants.

"You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well," Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and the Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, said in a statement.

Scientists used IQ tests to assess individuals' intelligence before and during group activity, while fMRI technology monitored brain function. They matched groups of individuals based on their IQ scores, then showed them their individual performance on cognitive tasks as compared to their peers. "We saw dramatic drops in the ability of some study subjects to solve problems. The social feedback had a significant effect," Montague said.

The study suggests that social cues, such as being in the presence of someone you think is smarter than you, can trigger strong neural responses that essentially debilitate cognitive, problem-solving abilities.

"Given the potentially harmful effects of social-status assignments and the correlation with specific neural signals, future research should be devoted to what, exactly, society is selecting for in competitive learning and workplace environments," lead study author Kenneth Kishida said in a statement. "By placing an emphasis on competition, for example, are we missing a large segment of the talent pool?"

Comments

[Justin Moore]

12:31 PM on 02/10/2012

of course, same station indicates houston is the 4th dumbest city in the world in a recent ranking..

[Justin Moore]

12:09 PM on 02/10/2012

awesome this has been my exact point...living here in houston everyone really focuses on being social and my point of contention is the fact that social events, whether it be business meetings or cocktail parties actually make you dumber...of course the idiots here believe that being social is the quintessance of intelligence whereas it actually inhibits problem solving skills...according to our friends at Virginia Tech. No wonder i feel like i'm getting dumber in the midst of all of this social interaction.

[imanormalalien]

07:44 AM on 02/10/2012

Now I have a good excuse to avoid working in group projects at school. thanks huffpo

[LeeBessToad]

07:37 AM on 02/10/2012

One of my alltime favorite quotes was from the great Dave Barry: "Meetings are something businesses have because they cannot masturbate". About sums it up completely.

[iam99]

02:53 AM on 02/10/2012

Meetings are where ego-speak outweighs more valuable common sense and the innate desire to not waste time.

[rmmartin]

04:55 PM on 02/09/2012

I completely agree with this. I also think that some people are pre-disposed to work in a group and others who work best on their own. I've noticed that for myself in particular, I can either lead or defer but I can't do both-collaboration. It has to be mine or not mine. I think that should be respected.

[Michele Meyer]

03:41 PM on 02/09/2012

So true. I was contracted with a large corporation that had meetings all the time, however, there seemed to be no actual work getting done. And all the corporate lingo..really prefer smaller businesses. If large corps had less meetings, all their full time employees would be part time.

[danikabay1]

08:36 AM on 02/09/2012

I personally dislike meetings. I find most of the work meetings I have attended to be loaded with redundant information or just a complete waste of time. Send me the information via email if necessary and it will take me less time than having to participate in a meeting.

[pixeloid]

07:32 AM on 02/09/2012

When you consider that Congress spends their entire time in group meeting, it explains a lot.

[pixeloid]

07:30 AM on 02/09/2012

It's interesting that after a disaster a few years back, NASA did an analysis and found PowerPoint to be a contributing factor. They've since stopped using it and gone back to using Word to produce actual informative documents.

[pixeloid]

07:22 AM on 02/09/2012

I always felt stupider after a business meeting and sometimes it could take hours before I could think properly again. I guess I wasn't just imagining it.

[Trey McC]

04:12 PM on 02/08/2012

That's why I decline my Mensa meeting invites.

[monstersfromtheid]

12:10 PM on 02/08/2012

I'm just wondering how they could do fMRI during group activity, the mental images this conjures up are quite funny.
Did they fit the whole group into the MR together? that would have been a tight squeeze.
Did they put one person in while the rest sat around, shouting over the banging of the machine?
I've worked with MR and I'd be fascinated to hear exactly how they did it,

[gx5000]

11:45 AM on 02/08/2012

Webinars and phone meetings aren't so bad, but live meetings are just the pits...
We get way more done without all the politics and nonsense of face to face...and the travel...

[pixeloid]

07:24 AM on 02/09/2012

There's no escape for us. My company has video conferencing as well.

[gx5000]

09:35 AM on 02/09/2012

Hey look....is he picking his nose ???
Yeah I've been to a few of those.....you look forward and see three different
groups, you look left and see another bunch of 1diots....er..oh that's us...d@mn.

lol

[GeoToronto]

09:35 AM on 02/08/2012

Meeting are for people who don't know how to use software like Outlook and sharepoint.

[lhdel]

10:48 AM on 02/08/2012

EXACTLY! how many meetings have I sat in where the presenter actually READ the powerpoint to us!!?

[GeoToronto]

11:06 AM on 02/08/2012

Yes!
There should be a new meeting rule, when the meeting your attending is killing you, you should have a secret word, that once you say it, you are allowed to run out.

ROSEBUD! ROSEBUD!

[pixeloid]

07:24 AM on 02/09/2012

I thought that was all meetings.