Teammate inaccuracy blindness: when information sharing tools hinder collaborative analysis.

ABSTRACTAsynchronous collaborative analysis is important in many fields, but information sharing can be a bottleneck. Tools for annotating, organizing, and summarizing information can help, but their value will likely depend on the accuracy of teammates' information. To document this claim, two experiments examined participants' performance on a complex detective task when they asynchronously received information from a teammate in a collaboration tool or received no such information. We found that receiving a progress report containing accurate information was associated with improved performance (vs. no information shared in a tool) but worse performance when the information was inaccurate. Teammates were evaluated as helpful even when they were not. Our findings point to a phenomenon of teammate inaccuracy blindness that arises when teammates provide inaccurate information. We propose some strategies for helping collaborators avoid or lessen this effect.