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In a world where your smartphone knows your dinner cravings, artificial intelligence (AI) is venturing into the intricate realm of <keyword id="21340844" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="human-emotions" source="keywords">human emotions</keyword>. Imagine an AI that can gauge your mood better than your closest friend. This intriguing thing is very much happening, and it could reshape how we interact with technology. <h2>The quest for <keyword id="23059919" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="emotion-recognition" source="keywords">emotion recognition</keyword></h2>Human emotions are complex and often elusive, making them challenging to quantify. Researchers at Tsinghua University are fusing traditional psychological methods with advanced AI tools to create a clearer path to <keyword id="23285769" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="emotion-quantification" source="keywords">emotion quantification</keyword>. While humans might struggle to articulate their feelings, a considerable amount of work is being done to train AI to observe, quantify, and recognise various emotional states. Through technologies like <keyword id="23285768" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="gesture-recognition" source="keywords">gesture recognition</keyword> and <keyword id="23285767" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="facial-emotion-recognition" source="keywords">facial emotion recognition</keyword> (FER), AI is preparing to become an emotional detective. As Feng Liu, a researcher at East China Normal University, noted, “This technology has the potential to transform fields such as health care, education, and customer service, facilitating <keyword id="21758007" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="personalised-experiences" source="keywords">personalised experiences</keyword> and enhanced comprehension of human emotions.” AI isn’t limited to one form of input; it combines a multitude of developments. For example, some techniques utilise EEG scans to monitor electrical activity in the brain, along with eye movement technology to gauge expressions. Other measurements, such as heart rate variability and electrical skin response, are also used to convert the intangible "emotion" into recognisable patterns. <div type="Article" hostid="261" msid="113417607" title="A medical professor pitted AI models against his students to see who would score better on his tests. The results were shocking!" mstype="2" mssubtype="0"></div>Multi-modal emotion recognition combines different perceptual channels — sight, hearing, and touch — to gain a more comprehensive understanding of emotions. Liu emphasises that “interdisciplinary collaboration between AI, psychology, psychiatry, and other fields will be key in achieving this goal and unlocking the full potential of emotion quantification for the benefit of society.” <h2>Why it matters</h2>So, why does it matter that AI is learning to be emotionally intelligent? In our increasingly digital world, the ability to understand emotions could enhance interactions with technology and improve our quality of life. This innovation could create personalised experiences that resonate with our emotional states, transforming AI from a mere tool into a valuable partner in our daily lives. Further, as <keyword id="19956983" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="mental-health" source="keywords">mental health</keyword> becomes a top priority, the potential for <keyword id="23285766" type="General" weightage="100" keywordseo="emotionally-intelligent-AI" source="keywords">emotionally intelligent AI</keyword> becomes even more significant. Emotion quantification AI can help monitor an individual’s mental health and create personalised experiences — all without the need to involve another person. This could lead to a more supportive environment for those struggling with their mental health. <div type="Article" hostid="261" msid="113412410" title="AI robots should not look like us, says Ex-Google robotics moonshot boss as he explains what he learnt at the company" mstype="2" mssubtype="0"></div>However, this emotionally savvy AI isn’t without challenges. Issues of safety and transparency, especially regarding sensitive topics like medical and psychological counselling, must be addressed. Stringent data handling practices and privacy measures will be essential. Additionally, ensuring that AI can adapt to cultural nuances is critical to maintaining its integrity and reliability. The findings of this research have been published in CAAI Artificial Intelligence Research and can be accessed <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.26599/AIR.2024.9150040">here</a>.

AI is learning to be 'emotionally intelligent' — here's why that matters

Zoom sucks, right? If you've spent any time on it — or any other video-chat app — you've probably felt it. No matter how good your internet connection is, the personal connection rarely clicks. You don't know when to start talking. You overlap and interrupt the person you're talking to, and they don't seem to be listening. Everyone is accounted for, but no one feels present.It's not just you. In a <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-02247-001" target="_blank" rel="noopener">study</a> last year, people who were face-to-face responded to yes/no questions in 297 milliseconds, on average, while those on Zoom chats took 976 milliseconds. Conversational turns — handing the mic back and forth between speakers, as it were — exhibited similar delays. The researchers hypothesized that something about the scant 30- to 70-millisecond delay in Zoom audio disrupts whatever neural mechanisms we meatbags use to get in sync with one another, that magic that creates true dialogue.This seems like something science could fix, doesn't it? But first we'd have to get past the vibes and understand what's actually bad — or maybe even good? — about video chat.That's the idea that struck Andrew Reece, the lead scientist at BetterUp Labs, the research arm of the big online coaching company. He knew from his job that video chats could be good. "We basically connect people on Zoom calls to have one person help another person be happier at work," he says. But there was one problem: "We don't record those calls. All we know is, when our members come out they're like, 'That was great, I want to do it again.' It's sort of a black box what's going on in there."So Reece wondered whether it might be possible to crack open that black box and learn why those conversations were working. Was it something about what people said, or how they said it? Was it the way they sounded, what their faces looked like? "We decided: OK, the first thing we wanted to do is just see conversation writ large," Reece says. "What kind of dynamics could we capture?"The result is the largest-ever database of one-on-one Zoom conversations. It's called CANDOR, short for Conversation: A Naturalistic Dataset of Online Recordings. Reece and his colleagues examined more than 1,600 conversations — some 850 hours and 7 million words total. The researchers paired volunteers, people who had never met each other, and asked them to hop on Zoom for half an hour about any old thing — with Record turned on. Which means that unlike most conversational databases, CANDOR didn't just encode their words, which were transcribed automatically, by digital algorithms. It also automatically captured things like the tone, volume, and intensity of conversational exchanges, recording everything from facial expressions to head nods to the number of "ums" and "yeahs." And before and after each Zoom chat, the researchers interviewed the participants, so they could measure their reactions to the interactions: their likes and dislikes, their favorite moments, their unspoken anxieties. Did they appreciate it, say, when their partner kept nodding in agreement? Or did it secretly piss them off?"We have variables from really low-level, millisecond-by-millisecond turn taking, all the way up to, 'Did you enjoy this conversation and why?'" says Gus Cooney, a social psychologist who helped develop CANDOR. "It's nicely processed, easily analyzable, and it's been really, really vetted." So this new corpus, as such databases are known among social scientists, might do more than help us better understand how our coworkers perceive us on Zoom. It may shed new light on what we talk about when we talk about talking today — the conversation of the future.<h2>You don't say!</h2>Think about the complexity of even the simplest of dialogues, and how we pass the conversational baton back and forth. You talk, I make some uh-huh noises, I talk, you hit me with an "OK" or two, you talk again and I nod, you shift to a new topic with a question, and I give you a yes or no before picking up the new thread.That pas de deux is a miracle of human communication. When people talk, somehow we almost never overlap. The gaps between you-go and I-go are just about a <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0903616106" target="_blank" rel="noopener">quarter of a second</a> — literally the blink of an eye, so fast that we must be predicting when our turn will come. We use fillers like uh-huhs and OKs — linguists call those "backchannels" — to align with one another. <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08351810701691123" target="_blank" rel="noopener">A nod while someone's talking</a> is encouragement; a nod at the end is off-putting. A "yes" comes within a half-second; a no takes longer. If I say yes, but delay until the back half of that second, you think I mean no. "Um" means "wait a little longer," "uh" means "I'm about to get to my point." The answering noise "huh" sounds pretty much the same in a dozen languages.The analysis of conversation goes back a long way — at least to the early 1970s and a <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780126235500500082" target="_blank" rel="noopener">classic paper on turn taking</a> as dialogue's primary engine. But the complexity of the data always made it a real slog. "It used to be very much at the fringe, because it was technically challenging to deal with real speech. Written stuff was dead easier. You can just go look at it," says Simon Garrod, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Glasgow who is one of the field's leading researchers. "That's changed because technology has changed. Suddenly everything is recorded, speech is recorded. It's all there."But people — well, grad students — still had to listen to or watch the recordings and note all the things that might be of interest to a researcher, a process called coding. "Transcription was a real struggle, actually," Garrod says. "It took hours and hours of people's work to do it, and you had to do it repeatedly." That meant you needed a big team — and a lot of money to pay them.So in 2018, Reece connected with Cooney, a grad-school pal who studied conversation. New tech, they thought, might solve the coding issue, and even account for the complexities of overlapping back-channel speech and the timing of turns. They figured they could just get volunteers to have a half hour of chitchat and ask them about how it felt.It turned out to be a lot harder than they expected. Everyone's video was laggy, which meant they had to scrap hundreds of hours of video for quality reasons. They also had to figure out how to get software to stitch together the two sides of the conversation precisely enough to allow them to analyze interactions down to the millisecond. "Hundreds of hours were spent on that particular problem," Reece says.When they finally assembled all the videos and built the neural nets to process the dialogues, many of their findings confirmed previous research. That was good; it signaled that their dataset was big enough to trust. But this was back in 2020, the year we all began struggling with how to interact over Zoom. So they were looking at something relatively new in the world. What made people happy on a video chat? And what made one person more fun to talk to than another?<h2>The Tom Cruises of Zoom</h2>Cooney and Reece's first pass at the data suggests that "good conversationalists" on Zoom are those who talk faster, louder, and more intensely. They're the Tom Cruises, as it were, of the interactive back-and-forth. People rated by their partners as better conversationalists spoke 3% faster than bad conversationalists — uttering about six more words a minute. And while the average loudness of speakers didn't change across bad or good conversations, the "good" talkers varied their decibel levels more than the "bad" talkers did. Cooney and Reece's team speculate that the good ones were better at reading the Zoom room, calibrating their volume to the curves of the conversation.But loudness, it turns out, isn't as good a metric as intensity — maybe because intensity is more subtle, a combination of the frequencies and sibilance of speech and the emotion conveyed by everything from tone to body language. To help the computer to assess something so ineffable — like, what is this thing you humans call love? — the CANDOR team fed it the <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0196391" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song</a>. That enabled the candorbots to draw on more than 7,000 recordings of 24 actors saying and singing things with different emotional shading, from happy or sad to fearful or disgusted. The machine found that women rated as better Zoom conversationalists tended to be more intense. The differences among men, strangely, were statistically insignificant. (The reverse was true for happiness. Male speakers who appeared to be happier were rated as better conversationalists, while the stats for women didn't budge.)Then there's nodding. Better-rated conversationalists nodded "yes" 4% more often and shook their heads "no" 3% more often. They were not "merely cheerful listeners who nod supportively," the researchers note, but were instead making "judicious use of nonverbal negations." Translation: An honest and well-timed no will score you more points than an insincere yes. Good conversationalists are those who appear more engaged in what their partners are saying.Another question the researchers looked at was: How much new stuff do you have to say when it's your turn to talk to keep a conversation fresh? The results were inconclusive. The coding system found that some rate of "semantic similarity" is ideal — the highly rated conversationalists, in general, changed the subject and brought bring new ideas more often than the poorly rated ones. But the machine couldn't decide whether the low-rated talkers had nothing interesting to add, or whether they just tended to repeat themselves more. More research is needed, apparently. "I still think that's one of the coolest things," Reece says.Overall, the study found, people liked chatting on Zoom, even during the hellish first year of the pandemic. That January, CANDOR found, barely anyone mentioned COVID-19; by December, it came up in almost every conversation. At the beginning of the year, only a quarter of the conversationalists talked about politics; by Christmas, politics came up in nearly half the chats. Yet when researchers asked participants to rate their "positive feelings" — defined as "good, pleasant, happy" — on a scale of one to 10, the mean rose from a little above a 6 before the video chats to more than 7 afterward. A rise in happiness was experienced by everyone, across all demographic groups, and especially by people between 50 and 69 years old. Some of the biggest surprises were what the researchers didn't find. The good news for BetterUp, which depends on video chat for its business model, was the lack of any evidence that people dislike Zoom itself. "The assumption was, the thing that makes you tired or sad is the medium," Reece says. "But it doesn't seem like that's true. We see massive effects of: You feel better when you talk to a stranger online." The very act of chatting, it turns out, makes people happy — even when it's over Zoom.The study also failed to confirm other assumptions. The old chestnuts about <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2933016" target="_blank" rel="noopener">men interrupting women</a> <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1018802521676" target="_blank" rel="noopener">more than vice versa</a>, or women being more accommodating and "affiliative" in their <a href="https://doi.org/10.12840/ISSN.2255-4165.026" target="_blank" rel="noopener">turn taking</a>? No evidence. Video chat making it hard for people to have smooth conversations? Nope. So maybe all those old findings are wrong. Or maybe CANDOR's algorithms weren't finely tuned enough to recognize jerky men or jerky audio. After all, you can't spell "mansplaining" without "AI." Either way, Cooney says, there's more to follow up here in the corpus.Next up for the CANDOR team: trying to analyze the optimal pace of smiles, and how quickly to smile back when your partner smiles first. "We've only done the top-line cut, which is to see how these things relate to overall enjoyment," Cooney says. "Really digging into how the moment-to-moment smiles 10 seconds ago relate to current smiles and relate to future smiles — that's something we're just on the cusp of understanding."<h2>Emphathetic kung-fu</h2>The CANDOR corpus is a good start — maybe. "Things like this study are exciting and going in the right direction — recording everything in real time, real humans talking to each other," says Nick Enfield, a linguist at the University of Sydney and author of "How We Talk." "We can get it transcribed at the flick of a switch, because we've got computational power to do so now."But, Enfield says, the dataset has some serious limitations, however huge it might be. For one thing, it's only in American English, which means scientists in the field can't use it to explore and identify cross-language commonalities. And for another, the conversations involved people who were randomly paired, which might be just weird enough to skew the data. "How much of your life — not your professional life, but your real life — is spent getting to know a complete stranger?" Enfield says.BetterUp has a financial incentive to optimize Zoom behaviors: It wants people to come out of conversations feeling good, feeling heard, feeling understood. And the CANDOR results certainly suggest some ways that a conversationalist can project those sensations. But whether those feelings are authentic — on either side of a dialogue — is a whole other story. Breaking these quantifications into qualifications, into "good" and "bad," turns conversations into empathic kung fu. These are the kind of simulated responses that successful dinner-party hosts, psychotherapists, and reporters operationalize to achieve their ends. As a onetime professional TV journalist, I promise you that I can nod intently into a camera and judiciously introduce new subjects for hours at a stretch.Maybe that doesn't matter if you're looking for a Zoom mentor through a service like BetterUp. Coaches gonna coach, right? But someday databases like CANDOR could be used to train artificial intelligences to imitate the way humans conduct conversations. Chatbots that serve as customer-service representatives or intake staffers at urgent-care centers may learn to nod and smile like the world's greatest conversationalists, but they're not going to feel anything. They can't. All they'll know is how to make us feel good — with deepfaked faces that understand precisely when to say uh-huh, and how widely to smile, down to the millimeter, no matter what they're actually saying. Studying Zoom calls may help us have better conversations on Zoom. But it could also end up making a weird future even weirder.<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/author/adam-rogers">Adam Rogers</a> is a senior correspondent at Insider.

Researchers just created the largest-ever database of how we interact on Zoom. Here are their tips for making everyone like you on video chats.

<ul class="summary-list"><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/scorpion">Scorpion</a> venom is not only dangerous - it can also make you quite a bit of money. </li><li>The deathstalker is one of the most dangerous scorpions on the planet, and its <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/venom">venom</a> is also the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/expensive">most expensive</a> liquid in the world at $39 million per gallon. </li><li>But it's not so simple to just buy a gallon - you'd have to milk one scorpion 2.64 million times to fill a gallon.</li><li>So why do people buy this stuff? Watch the video above to find out.</li></ul>The venom from a deathstalker scorpion can be deadly. It can also make you quite a bit of money. Here's why.Following is a transcript from the video:Narrator: The deathstalker is one of the most dangerous scorpions on the planet, and what makes it so dangerous also happens to be the most expensive liquid in the world. This stuff costs $39 million per gallon. Now, even if you had the money, you couldn't just go and buy a gallon of the stuff, because you can only get it in tiny, minuscule amounts. $130 will get you a droplet that's smaller than a grain of sugar.The reason why is pretty simple: the stuff is hard to get. Scorpions are almost always milked by hand, one by one. And one scorpion produces, at the most, just two milligrams of venom at a time.So, let's do the math. If you owned one scorpion you would have to milk it 2.64 million times to fill a gallon. And let's face it, you'd probably get stung along the way as well. One sting isn't enough to kill a healthy human, but I think it hurts.Steve Trim: I'd easily put it being a hundred times more painful than a bee sting, but because pain is a subjective and emotional experience, it's difficult to really get a quantification on that. But it's definitely gonna ruin your day.Narrator: That's <a href="http://venomtech.co.uk/">Venomtech</a> founder Steve Trim, one of the few people brave enough to deal with these animals. That's because inside that deadly venom, there's actually tons of useful components that are helping pioneer breakthrough medicines.Chlorotoxins, for example, are the perfect size to bind with certain cancer cells in the brain and spine, which is helpful for identifying the specific size and location of tumors. And researchers have used scorpine to eliminate malaria in mosquitoes. Kaliotoxin has been given to rats to fight bone disease. Scientists hope it could work in humans too.These are just a few of the medical benefits that researchers have found in scorpion venom. And the more they research it, the more uses they find. Which means demand for this miracle venom continues to grow. So scientists are now trying to figure out ways to get more of it faster.Like this group out of Morocco, who invented the first remote control machine for milking scorpions. It can safely milk up to four scorpions at a time. It might not sound like much, but it's four times faster than a human. Scientists hope to get on the market within a few years, making the whole process faster and safer."Faster and safer?", you're probably thinking, "Hmmm, maybe I should start my own scorpion farm."Well, get in line, wise guy.Steve Trim: There clearly has been a surge in people thinking, "Oh, this is a get rich quick scheme." But with people not understanding how scorpion venom is used. We have seen a rise in the number of people saying they've got 300 grams of scorpion venom, do we want to buy it? And the answer is "No, we've got our own."

Scorpion venom is the most expensive liquid in the world - here's why it costs $39 million per gallon

Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesSatya Nadella is the CEO of Microsoft.<ul class="summary-list"><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/microsoft">Microsoft</a> and IDEO studied what makes a successful team.</li><li>Now they've created a free guide to effective collaboration, featuring five key takeaways.</li><li>The guide taps into the increasing importance of teamwork, and the fact that most companies haven't gotten it right yet.</li><li>It also fits with Microsoft's ongoing culture change, and its emphasis on growth mindset.</li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/prime?module=article&amp;area=summary">Click here for more BI Prime stories.</a></li></ul>Things you can count on me for.Things I may need help with.Ways I'm looking to grow.These are some of the prompts that make up the "profile of me," one of several worksheets from a new guide to effective collaboration at work. Purple text below a simple pencil icon encourages you to imagine that you've just joined a new team and want to let your colleagues know how you work best.The guide is a product of a two-year-plus partnership between Microsoft and the global design consultancy IDEO. Executives from both companies were tasked with analyzing the most productive teams across industries and figuring out what makes them tick - and how other teams can replicate their success.Microsoft released the guide, titled <a href="https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/teamwork-in-the-workplace?ocid=AID2490469_QSG_PR_378543&amp;rtc=1">The Art of Teamwork</a>, in November. It's free for everyone, and not just Microsoft customers.A series of slides walks you through the fundamentals of collaboration, plus stories about teamwork among astronauts on Mars and fashion designers at Oscar de la Renta. Managers can download instructions for team-building exercises like "values train" (translate the team's values into behaviors) and "tension tour" (talk about what causes moments of tension on the team).<a href="https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/art-of-teamwork-guide">The Art of Teamwork/Microsoft</a>Under "my best/my worst," team members jot down the conditions that facilitate and hinder their performance.Microsoft isn't making money from this guide, or at least not directly. (The company said it won't disclose how much it spent on the research and design processes.) The company's investment in the science of teamwork makes sense only from a longer-term perspective. The Art of Teamwork capitalizes on business leaders' growing realization that collaboration is less a squishy nice-to-have and more a key to success in the future workplace - and most organizations still haven't gotten it right.The Art of Teamwork also fits nicely into Microsoft's ongoing <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-growth-correlated-to-a-growth-organizational-mindset-2019-11">company-culture change</a> led by CEO Satya Nadella, and its efforts to be seen as an employer that's more collaborative than cutthroat.Over time, the two companies anticipate that the guide will serve as a clever form of market research. Execs at Microsoft and IDEO say they plan to build new digital tools for Microsoft Teams - the workplace collaboration app that has <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-teams-20-million-daily-active-users-slack-2019-11">20 million</a> daily active users to Slack's 12 million - based on the feedback they receive from companies that use the resource.Mark Swift, a partner director of design at Microsoft Teams, told Business Insider that The Art of Teamwork guide is but a small piece of the company's broader effort to improve its customers' work experience. "It's really just the beginning," he said.<h2>The most successful teams make it safe for people to mess up and ask questions</h2>Based on their observations, Microsoft and IDEO concluded that there are <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2019/11/19/5-attributes-successful-teams/">five key attributes</a> of successful teams: team purpose, collective identity, awareness and inclusion, trust and vulnerability, and constructive tension. The Art of Teamwork guide covers each attribute in a different section.The fourth attribute on that list - trust and vulnerability - is related to "<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/amy-edmondson-on-psychological-safety-2015-11">psychological safety</a>," a term coined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson to describe an environment where team members feel comfortable taking risks. In a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/psychological-safety-assessment-no-hard-feelings-book">psychologically safe workplace</a>, employees aren't scared of making mistakes, sharing new ideas, or asking simple questions.A few years ago, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/google-explains-top-traits-of-its-best-teams-2015-11">Google led similar research</a> on effective teamwork and yielded much the same findings that Microsoft did, especially on the importance of <a href="https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness/steps/foster-psychological-safety/">psychological safety</a>. As Charles Duhigg wrote in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html">the New York Times magazine</a> in 2016, Google learned that a team's dynamics were more significant than how smart or competent the individual team members were.<h2>Microsoft has been undergoing a culture shift rooted in 'growth mindset'</h2>MicrosoftKathleen Hogan is Microsoft's HR chief.Microsoft has been exploring the psychology of work since Nadella took the reins from Steve Ballmer in 2014. At the time, Microsoft's performance was stagnating; the company is now one of the most valuable on the planet, with a market cap of <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/">$1.2 trillion</a>.Nadella has used a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-growth-correlated-to-a-growth-organizational-mindset-2019-11">company-culture transformation</a> to help power Microsoft's turnaround. His leadership team has overseen a shift from competition and workaholism to collaboration and the willingness to learn.This culture shift has been grounded in "<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-a-growth-mindset-leads-to-success-2014-8">growth mindset</a>," a concept in developmental psychology that describes the belief that skills can be developed through hard work and that failure is an opportunity to learn. That's in contrast with a "fixed mindset," where talent is assumed to be innate, and failure a signal of incompetency.A growing body of research supports Microsoft's focus on growth mindset. A <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31502926">recent paper</a> published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that people were more committed to their employers, and more likely to trust them, when those organizations valued a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset. (To identify growth and fixed mindsets, researchers asked employees to indicate how much their company encouraged behaviors like working together or cheating by cutting corners.)Other research suggests that companies with fixed mindsets tend to have a few <a href="https://hbr.org/2014/11/how-companies-can-profit-from-a-growth-mindset">"star" employees</a> whose contributions are recognized and appreciated. Employees who aren't stars may worry about failing and may avoid taking up innovative projects that could potentially benefit the organization. At growth-mindset companies, leaders are more likely to say their employees are innovative and collaborative, and that the employees show management potential.To cultivate a growth mindset among its employees, Microsoft has changed its approach to people-management, performance evaluation, and hiring. In a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-hr-chief-kathleen-hogan-company-culture-change-satya-nadella-2019-8">previous interview</a> with Business Insider, Microsoft's HR chief, Kathleen Hogan, said the company got rid of stack ranking, which rated employees against each other. Now managers track <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-performance-reviews-how-they-work-under-satya-nadella-2019-8">how much employees helped others succeed</a>, in addition to their individual impact.Hogan thinks effective collaboration between colleagues translates to the success of the overall organization. "Instead of just operating in your silo and just optimizing for your team, it's really optimizing for team Microsoft," she said. "And that belief was if we did that, we would best be able to serve our customers."<h2>Collaboration will be a key skill in the workplace of the future</h2>Across industries, it's becoming more important for people to work well together. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/the-downsides-of-collaboration-between-coworkers-2016-1">Business professors say</a> the workplace is quickly moving away from specialists working alone and toward collaboration between colleagues in different divisions, and often different time zones. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/soft-skills-leaders-need-for-success-2016-4">Soft skills</a> like effective communication are in demand as technical tasks are increasingly automated. Meanwhile, <a href="https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/trends-and-forecasting/research-and-surveys/pages/talent-landscape.aspx">hiring managers say</a> they're having a hard time finding candidates who are good collaborators.<a href="https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/art-of-teamwork-guide">The Art of Teamwork/Microsoft</a>An image in the guide illustrates how teams achieve constructive tension.Microsoft isn't the only top tech company to pick up on this trend. Kyle Ewing, Google's head of talent, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/google-jobs-interviews-humility-collaboration-teamwork-skills-kyle-ewing-2019-12">previously told Business Insider</a> that she's wary of hiring someone who doesn't appropriately credit their team for an accomplishment.Oisin Hanrahan, chief product officer at the $4 billion IAC brand ANGI Homeservices, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/interview-questions-job-skills-collaboration-angi-handy-oisin-hanrahan">previously told Business Insider</a> that hiring managers test almost every job candidate on their ability to work collaboratively. When the candidate starts to present a solution to a problem, an interviewee will interject with another idea."If the alternative solution being proposed is better, and the candidate recognizes that, it's generally a pretty good sign," Hanrahan said.<h2>The Art of Teamwork will help Microsoft understand the biggest problems teams face today</h2><a href="https://www.comparably.com/companies/microsoft">Bryan Thomas/Getty Images</a>Microsoft and IDEO kicked off their partnership by studying teams in settings beyond conference rooms. They spoke with doctors and nurses in training at a medical simulation center, an alpine search-and-rescue team, and chefs at award-winning restaurants. Once they'd identified some common themes, they tested their hypotheses by observing and interviewing teams in different contexts.Over the next year or so, Microsoft is going to pay close attention to how companies use The Art of Teamwork. Those observations will help execs decide which collaboration tools to build next.Swift, the partner director of design at Microsoft Teams, said he wants to develop tools that facilitate belonging and a "strong collective identity," even among distributed teams. Swift manages more than 100 Microsoft employees across the US, the Czech Republic, and India; some are researchers and some are designers.Right now Swift is thinking about ways to digitally replicate some of the social cues that are obvious in a physical workspace. In person, you see someone wearing headphones and scowling, and you know they're trying to focus. Online, that can be trickier to discern. "These are really hard problems," Swift said.Ultimately, Microsoft's teamwork initiative suggests that it might be possible to digitize the more abstract, fuzzy parts of work that seemingly defy quantification."Some of The Art of Teamwork is about understanding the emotional impact of what it means to be a team," Swift said.Sure, tech companies can build and sell tools for chatting with your coworkers and collaborating on a project report in real time. Now they're also building tools to help you feel like you belong and to better understand what work means to you.Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Maybe both; maybe neither.Swift drew a direct link between The Art of Teamwork and Microsoft's broader emphasis on growth mindset. "No one team or organization is the same, and everyone has a different perspective on what makes a successful team," he said. "The goal is to take this work and continue to learn."<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/intelligence/bi-intelligence-daily?IR=T&amp;itm_source=businessinsider&amp;itm_medium=ctgr_bii&amp;itm_term=ctgr_subscription&amp;itm_content=microsoft&amp;itm_campaign=bi-intelligence-daily"></a> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/tornadoes-more-us-than-anywhere-else-world-2019-5">Each year, the US gets around 4 times as many twisters as the rest of the world combined - here's why</a></h3>

Microsoft spent 2 years trying to crack the science of teamwork. Here's how any company can use the tech giant's findings to get the most out of their employees.

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div>On Friday morning, I woke up to realize I had lost a 159-day long Snapchat streak with a close friend of mine.I don't want to be dramatic, but it was as if a part of me had died while I was sleeping.Upon making this gruesome discovery, I was overcome by a rush of emotions: anger, disbelief, disappointment, and sadness.My friend and I messaged back and forth, arguing over who was to blame for the disappearance of our streak, which we had begun in early March. He claims it was me who had neglected to snap him back. If he's right, I'll carry that regret with me for the rest of my life.This wasn't the first time we'd lost a streak, mind you. A few weeks before this one began, we had lost another than was in the 100-day range. But this most recent streak might actually be the last. That's because after a few hours went by and I settled down to write this, I was no longer annoyed or upset. Instead, I was relieved.<h2>Snapchat streaks cause nothing but trouble</h2>I don't remember when Snapchat introduced the streak - a counter next to your most popular contacts that shows how many consecutive days you've exchanged snaps - but I remember being instantly hooked.Suddenly, I didn't need to be doing something fun or noteworthy to send a snap to my friends. We were growing our streaks and, by extension, our friendships, just by using the app.Snapchat encourages streak-building by putting special emojis next to your most-snapped contacts. If you have the determination to reach a 100-day streak, you're rewarded with a "100" emoji next to that contact's name.But for me, streaks quickly went from a fun, novelty feature of the app, to one that caused me stress and anxiety (relatively speaking). Streaks became what separated my "real" friends from the rest of my contacts on the app. I had to maintain snap streaks not because my friends or I wanted to, but because letting it disappear would see that physical quantification of our friendship fall back down to zero.This tweet sums up what it feels like when you lose a long streak:&#xa0;<h2>Streaks defeat the purpose of Snapchat</h2>Snapchat streaks are rarely organic. They may naturally get to 10 or 15 days without any effort, but once you realize you have an active streak, you feel compelled to keep it going.And that's point. Snapchat wants users to feel compelled to return to the app over and over again for, say, 159 straight days.But using Snapchat for the sake of keeping a streak alive sucks the joy out of what is otherwise a fun app. I can't count how many times I've gotten snaps from my friends that are simply a photo of a wall or the ceiling with the word "Streak" written on them.A quick search on Twitter shows that this is a widespread phenomenon.&#xa0;To make matters worse, if you do decide to end a streak, an hourglass icon will pop up next to it, informing you of its impending doom. It's anxiety inducing, especially when all it takes to make it go away is sending a single snap.And though keeping my streaks alive has been bringing me back to Snapchat day after day, it has also been driving me away from it. I no longer look at my friends' stories, nor do I often use the face-changing lenses or location-marking geofilters. In fact, I don't use Snapchat much at all anymore. I've grown to resent the app and the way streaks have made me feel compelled to use it.<h2>Moving forward with my life</h2>I've completed the five stages of grief for my 159-day snap streak: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I even apologized to my friend. With&#xa0;our streak gone, I don't feel resentful of having to snap my friend every day. Instead, we talk when we actually&#xa0;have something to say.That said, I'm still totally hooked to Snapchat - I even have another, longer streak going with a different friend. Our streak is at 289 days and counting.Get the latest Snap stock price<a href="http://markets.businessinsider.com/stock/SNAP-Quote"> here.</a><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div> <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/spanish-scientist-making-sex-robots-end-human-sex-technology-trafficking-prostitution-ethics-2017-7">A Spanish scientist is making robots that he thinks could end sex between humans</a></h3> <div> </div> </div>

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