“The clown was the most central figure” in one South Pole Station group, Johnson told me. Johnson followed up those observations with studies of groups at various research facilities in Antarctica and found that in the most effective of them, members of the crew adopted informal roles that contributed to group cohesion. He never complained and was well liked by all, Johnson said. Sadsack willingly accepted being the butt of jokes and pranks in which both groups participated. During a prolonged strike that kept the men largely confined to their bunkhouses, he observed one of them emerge as what he called the “court jester.” Nicknamed by the others as Captain Sadsack, he alleviated tension and maintained cohesion between two groups of Italian-American fisherman from different geographic areas. Jeffrey Johnson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida, related his observations among small groups, especially fishermen who were isolated for long periods in the Alaskan Arctic. With increasing time in isolation, crews exhibited a decline in their ability to think together and solve problems. DeChurch correlated the latter partly to the increasing communications delay as the simulations moved farther from Earth. There are typically periods of peak crew intelligence and periods of “problematic” crew intelligence. All of the groups showed improvement in behavioral areas of collective performance, but with increasing time in isolation, they exhibited a decline in their ability to think together, combine expertise, and solve problems creatively. They were tested with four behaviors related to collective intelligence: making decisions, executing tasks, negotiating and resolving conflicts, and generating new ideas and solutions to problems. At the AAAS meeting, Leslie DeChurch, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, described HERA isolation experiments in which nine four-person crews spent 30 to 45 days living under conditions that simulated part of a journey to Mars. The Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) project is a human Petri dish, located at NASA’s Johnson Space Center near Houston, Texas, and designed to study interactions among several humans in a small space over extended periods of time.
Could they get along with each other and resolve crises without the nearly instantaneous backup that mission control has provided for astronauts on the International Space Station and even the moon?
Due to the distance, communications with Earth could be delayed up to 22 minutes each way, requiring the crew to be essentially autonomous in case a problem arose. That crew might comprise several nationalities and cultures and other demographic variations. It would take 259 days to get there, and the crew would have to stay on the Red Planet for an Earth-year to be in proper position to return home, another nine-month journey. NASAĪ trip to Mars would last almost three years. Surely they are smiling because that floating pizza looks a whole better than it tastes. Here, five of the six crew members on Expedition 59 of the International Space Station gather for dinner. ONE SMALL STEP FOR PIZZA: Laughter is the best medicine for astronauts confined in small spaces for long flights.
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Although we have learned a lot from the space program about such hazards to astronauts as radiation and gravity fields, Contractor said, “It is only in the past decade or so that we have begun to write the manual … for the social impacts that accompany humans who are going into space.”With increasing time in isolation, crews exhibited a decline in their ability to think together and solve problems. As Noshir Contractor of Northwestern University put it, “the human body is the one object on a spacecraft over which engineers have no control.” Contractor, a professor of behavioral science, was speaking at this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, D.C. Lindstrøm’s joviality is seen by behavioral scientists as an essential component of a small group that must live in closed quarters over an extended period of time, such as a four- to six-member expedition to Mars. The great polar explorer Roald Amundsen credited expedition cook Adolf Henrik Lindstrøm as having “rendered greater and more valuable services to the Norwegian polar expedition than any other man.” He was citing not only Lindstrøm’s vaunted prowess as a chef, but his keen sense of humor, with which he regularly defused conflicts among the isolated crew members.
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