First, all the members of the good teams spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.” In some teams, for instance, everyone spoke during each task. In other groups, conversation ebbed from assignment to assignment—but by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount.
“As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,” said Woolley. “But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined. The conversations didn’t need to be equal every minute, but in aggregate, they had to balance out.”
Second, the good teams tested as having “high average social sensitivity”—a fancy way of saying that the groups were skilled at intuiting how members felt based on their tone of voice, how people held themselves, and the expressions on their faces.
One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask them to describe what that person is thinking or feeling—the empathy test described previously. This is a “test of how well the participant can put themselves into the mind of the other person, and ‘tune in’ to their mental state,” wrote the creator of the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test, Simon Baron-Cohen of the University of Cambridge. While men, on average, correctly guess the emotion of the person in the photo only 52 percent of the time, women typically guess right 61 percent.
People on the good teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. They spent time asking one another what they were thinking about. The good teams also contained more women.
Coming back to the question of which team to join, if you are given a choice between the serious-minded, professional Team A, or the free-flowing, more informal Team B, you should opt for Team B. Team A is smart and filled with effective colleagues. As individuals, they will all be successful. But as a team, they still tend to act like individuals. There’s little to suggest that, as a group, they become collectively intelligent, because there’s little evidence that everyone has an equal voice and that members are sensitive to teammates’ emotions and needs.
In contrast, Team B is messier. People speak over one another, they go on tangents, they socialize instead of remaining focused on the agenda. Everyone speaks as much as they need to, though. They feel equally heard and are attuned to one another’s body language and expressions. They try to anticipate how one another will react. Team B may not contain as many individual stars, but when that group unites, the sum is much greater than any of its parts.
If you ask the original Saturday Night Live team why the show was such a success, they’ll talk about Lorne Michaels. There’s something about his leadership, they’ll say, that made everything come together. He had an ability to make everyone feel heard, to make even the most self-centered actors and writers pay attention to each other. His eye for talent is nearly unrivaled in entertainment over the last forty years.
You’ll also find people who say that Michaels is aloof, socially awkward, proud, and jealous, and that when he decides to fire someone, he’ll cut them completely adrift. You might not want Michaels as a friend. But as the leader of Saturday Night Live, what he’s created is extraordinary: one of the longest-running shows in history, built on the talent of egomaniacal comedians who, twenty times a year for four decades, have put their craziness aside just long enough to make a live television program with only a week’s preparation.
Michaels himself, still the show’s executive producer, says the reason why Saturday Night Live has succeeded is because he works hard to force people to become a team. The secret to making that happen, he says, is giving everyone a voice and finding people willing to be sensitive enough to listen to one another.
“Lorne was deliberate about making sure everyone got a chance to pitch their ideas,” the writer Marilyn Miller told me. “He would say, ‘Do we have pieces for the girls this week?’ ‘Who hasn’t been on in a while?’?”
“He has this kind of psychic ability to draw in everyone,” said Alan Zweibel. “I honestly believe that’s why the show has existed for forty years. At the top of each script, there’s a list of the initials of everyone who worked on that sketch and Lorne has always said he’s happiest the more initials he sees.”
Michaels is almost ostentatious in his demonstrations of social sensitivity—and he expects the cast and writers to mimic him. During the early years of the show, he was the one who appeared with a soothing word when an exhausted writer was crying in his office. He has been known to interrupt a rehearsal or table read and quietly take an actor aside to ask if they need to talk about something going on in their personal life. Once, when the writer Michael O’Donoghue was inordinately proud of an obscene commercial parody, Michaels ordered it read at eighteen different rehearsals—even though everyone knew the network’s censors would never let it on the air.
“I remember walking up to Lorne once and saying, ‘Okay, here’s my idea, it’s a bunch of girls at their first slumber party and they are telling each other how sex works.’ And Lorne said, ‘Write it up,’ just like that, no questions asked. Then he took an index card and put it on the board for the next show.” That sketch—which appeared on Saturday Night Live on May 8, 1976—became one of the show’s most famous pieces. “I was on top of the world,” said Miller. “He’s got this social ESP. Sometimes he knows exactly what will make you feel like the most important person on earth.”
Many of the original actors and writers on Saturday Night Live weren’t particularly easy to get along with. They freely admit that, even today, they are combative and gossipy and sometimes downright mean. But when they worked together, they were careful with one another’s feelings. Michael O’Donoghue might have dropped Garrett Morris’s script into a trash can, but he made a point, afterward, to tell Morris he was joking, and when Morris suggested an idea about a depressing children’s story, O’Donoghue came up with “The Little Train That Died.” (“I know I can! I know I can! Heart attack! Heart attack! Oh, my God, the pain!”) The SNL team avoided picking fights with one another. (“When I made that Hitler joke, Marilyn wouldn’t speak to me,” Beatts told me. “But that’s the point. She didn’t speak. She didn’t escalate it into a whole big thing.”) People might have criticized one another’s ideas, but they were careful about how far they let their critiques go. They disagreed and clashed, but everyone still had a voice at each table read, and despite the sniping and competition, they were oddly protective of one another. “Everyone liked everyone else, or at least worked hard to pretend like they liked everyone,” said Don Novello, a writer on the show in the 1970s and ’80s and the actor who played Father Guido Sarducci. “We genuinely trusted each other, as crazy as that sounds.”