Category: News

The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) is back this year with its annual convention. This year, all of the pre-conference hosted are virtual (a list of all pre-conference can be found here) and our lab director Noshir Contractor was invited to be one of the speakers in the Bringing Intragroup Processes Back to Social Psychologypreconference. This pre-conference includes numerous speakers from various disciplines (i.e. social psychology, management, computer sciences) who studies social interactions within a group (in particular intragroup processes). As the last speaker of the day, Professor Contractor shared his insights on repairing interactions and/or relationships, with a talk titled Teaming in the Time of COVID-19: What Astronaut crews can teach us about “re-pairing” our relationships.

Today Noshir Contractor, Dorothy Carter and Sandra Whitmire attended the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2021 Annual Meeting press briefing and discussed topics surrounding science of teams in long distance space exploration. This briefing was conducted prior to their Scientific Session tomorrow on Understanding and Enabling Human Travel to the Moon and Mars, which will be live at 1PM EST.

Session Information:

NASA is preparing to send the first woman and the next man to land on the Moon and then on to Mars. These efforts are leveraging advances in science and engineering to design the complex technology that will take humans on these missions. Yet the one element that scientists cannot design are the humans these rockets will carry. Over the past 6 decades, researchers have made remarkable progress in understanding how humans respond physiologically to, and can mitigate, the extreme conditions in space such as radiation and weightlessness. However, it is only in the past decade that we have begun to understand how humans respond psychosocially to, and can mitigate, the effects of isolated, confined, and extreme environments for long durations. Further, unlike previous space missions, deep space exploration teams will face the ultimate communication barrier: light speed. Delays of up to 22 minutes for a signal to travel from Mars to Earth means messaging “Houston we have a problem” during an emergency is not an option. Hence teams exploring deep space will need to act with an unprecedented level of autonomy while coordinating with “teams of teams” back on earth. This session brings together an interdisciplinary panel of experts all deeply engaged in conducting the science that is helping NASA understand, anticipate and mitigate the effects of deep space exploration on teamwork and its performance on upcoming missions.

Speakers: Tom Williams, Noshir Contractor, and Dorothy Carter

Moderator: Leslie DeChurch

Respondent: Suzanne Bell, Jack Stuster, and Nick Kanas

Other Resources:

For more info on the press briefing, click here.

Last Thursday (Feb 4, 2021) marks the end of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Human Research Program Investigators’ Workshop Annual Conference. We had a great time sharing some insights from our NASA projects and taking part in the Q&A Sessions. Great work Noshir Contractor, Leslie Cardone DeChurch, Alina Lungeanu and team — and thank you for all of your hard work!

If you miss any of our presentations, please head over to our Videos section to watch the recorded presentations.

Graduate student Jasmine Wu will be participating in the Third North American Social Networks Conference (NASN). She will be sharing her work on the Enterprise Social Media Project, particularly on Social Network Churn Within and Between Teams in Times of COVID-19. Her presentation touches on network changes happening in a multi-national industrial manufacturing company during COVID-19, with a focus on the differences in response to remote work between high and low performers. 

Don’t forget to check out her presentation this Thursday, 28th January 2021 from 1:30-1:50PM CST. You can tune in to her presentation via this link.

Citation:

Wu, Y. J., Srinivas, A., Antone, B., DeChurch, L. A., & Contractor, N. S. Social Network Churn Within and Between Teams in Times of COVID-19. Accepted at the Third North American Social Networks Conference.