Stress effects upon communication in distributed teams

Advances in telecommunication technology have made it possible for humans to communicate as team members, and make critical decisions, while individual team members may be many miles apart. However, evolutionary pressures on language may have favored the efficient use of face-to-face and local information in communications, especially under stress. An intriguing question then is whether a stress adaptation appropriate for most of hominid evolutionary history is, in fact, maladaptive in remoted teams. Using chess as the formal domain, changes in the language of team communication were investigated. Two-person teams of either experienced or novice players competed against a computer in stressed and unstressed conditions. Team members were functionally remote from one another, and each was able to see only part of the board. To play, individuals had to communicate threat and response information via aviation headsets. Results indicate that stress affects intra-team communications at the level of lexical choice. Specifically, teams used significantly more pronouns under stress, in particular exophoric pronouns. These changes appear to represent a substantial degradation of sentence cohesion. The results also suggest that the well-documented resistance of experts to performance degradation under stress also extends to their communicative competence.