Sleep Deprivation Impairs and Caffeine Enhances My Performance, but Not Always Our Performance

Abstract

What effects do factors that impair or enhance performance in individuals have when these individuals act in groups? We provide a framework, called the GIE ("Effects of Grouping on Impairments and Enhancements") framework, for investigating this question. As prominent examples for individual-level impairments and enhancements, we discuss sleep deprivation and caffeine. Based on previous research, we derive hypotheses on how they influence performance in groups, specifically process gains and losses in motivation, individual capability, and coordination. We conclude that the effect an impairment or enhancement has on individual-level performance is not necessarily mirrored in group performance: grouping can help or hurt. We provide recommendations on how to estimate empirically the effects individual-level performance impairments and enhancements have in groups. By comparing sleep deprivation to stress and caffeine to pharmacological cognitive enhancement, we illustrate that we cannot readily generalize from group results on one impairment or enhancement to another, even if they have similar effects on individual-level performance.

Keywords: caffeine; enhancement; group performance; group processes; impairment; neuroenhancement; pharmacological cognitive enhancement; process gains; process losses; sleep deprivation; stress.

Figure 1.

Examples for interaction patterns between the variables “nominal versus actual group performance” and “impairment/enhancement absent versus present.”