If you are aware of any such papers - do let me know. Here are the few I have discovered.
Research Papers on Conversation
Recent research that has not been widely published throws some fascinating light on the power of conversation. Some of it is surprising, even counter intuitive.
Who would have thought that having a friendly conversation can boost your cognitive ability or that team performance can be improved by increasing the amount of face-to-face communication regardless of what is talked about.
- Friends (and Sometimes Enemies) With Cognitive Benefits:
What Types of Social Interactions Boost Executive Functioning?
By Oscar Ybarra, Piotr Winkielman, Irene Yeh, Eugene Burnstein, Liam Kavanagh
http://spp.sagepub.com/content/2/3/253
Talking with people in a friendly way can make it easier to solve common problems. But conversations that are competitive in tone, rather than cooperative, have no cognitive benefits.
- Why is conversation so easy?
By Simon Garrod; Martin J. Pickering
http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/courses/crsinf/261/ARCHIVES/S07/GarrodPickering2004.pdf
Humans are 'designed' for dialogue rather than monologue.
- Group Discussion as Interactive Dialogue or as Serial Monologue:
The Influence of Group Size
By Nicolas Fay; Simon Garrod; Jean Carletta
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.8.4348&rep=rep1&type=pdf
In small, 5-person groups, the communication is like dialogue and members are influenced most by those with whom they interact in the discussion. However, in large, 10-person groups, the communication is like monologue and members are influenced most by the dominant speaker.
- Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups
By Anita Williams Woolley, Christopher F. Chabris, Alexander Pentland, Nada Hashmi,Thomas W. Malone
http://advance.njit.edu/doc/Gender,%20Collaboration%20&%20Group%20Intelligence.pdf
Performance is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.
- The New Science of Building Great Teams
By Alexander Pentland
April 2012 Harvard Business Review
http://www.timgroup.ethz.ch/education/Courses_at_TIMGROUP/spring_2013/pentland_team.pdf
The most important predictor of success in a group is the amount - not the content - of social interaction.
