 Our fifth contestant this afternoon is Jonathan Koosh, his title, Ties That Bind and Ties That Tear, the influence of network centralization and density on shared social identity and performance. Imagine that you're the leader of a team, or the manager of a team that's working on some kind of complex, collaborative task. And they're not doing very well. They're having lots of trouble effectively collaborating. So one thing that you can do is look at who's communicating to who within this group. So let's imagine that you do that, and you find the structure on the top left. So in this structure, you have four people that are talking with one another over three connections. So a reasonable thing to think would be, maybe these people aren't talking enough with one another, or they're people that should be talking that currently aren't. So you have a choice as the manager. Do you wanna suggest two people talk with one another and interact more closely who aren't currently communicating? But if so, you have a choice. Who do you want to get to talk with one another? Do we choose the people on either ends of this chain who aren't currently talking, and have them communicate with one another, creating a circle type structure? Or if we wanna take one of the members who are internal to the chain and have them communicate to the other person they're not currently communicating with. So both of these two structures that we end up with are very similar in lots of ways, but they're different in their structure, what we call centralization. The network on the left, members are fairly equally connected with one another. So we call this a decentralized network. Whereas the network on the right is more, members are more unequal in how they're connected. There's one member who can communicate with everyone, and then the other members vary in the kinds and types of connections that they have. My hypothesis in this project where that when members are unequally connected with the peers within their group, they're going to feel less like a real member of this group. So the higher the extent to which members are unequally connected, the less the groups will have what we call a shared social identity, which is the extent to which they feel like they're a valued member of the team. So we're gonna test this hypothesis. I ran an experiment where I brought people into the laboratory to complete a complex collaborative task and I assigned them to a communication structure. They varied both in the number of connections that were available, as well as the overall structure of the group, where some networks were decentralized, where members were equally connected and some were centralized, where members were unequally connected. So as we see from the bar charts, for the decentralized groups, where members were equally connected, allowing more members to talk with one another, increased slightly their extent to which they felt like a real member of the team. However, for centralized groups, when we increased the number of ties available, it actually made these members feel less like they were really part of a team, which is interesting because now more members are actually talking with one another. But what's going on is that these members don't, they recognize that there's differences in how they're connected, leading them to feel like less of a team. And shared social identity is really important because the more shared social identity group members have, they're better able to collaborate and they produce fewer errors on this task and come up with more innovative ideas. So my suggestion to the manager from the original, from the original example, is to encourage ties that bind members together as opposed to those that tear them apart. Thank you.