Over-simplified review of evidence on impact of background music on creative work: small hit to memory/attention, but makes you happier, so you may do better work on net.
Good collabs have a similar logic. Distracting, coord costs—but making work more fun may be high-order bit.
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I think there's much more to collaboration than making it social and fun. For one, source of peer feedback (though that can be bad too). For another, there's shared working memory space.
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Totally, 100%, there's a lot going on (and a lot more deficits in collaborative work too!)… but I'm sort of charmed by the notion that you could ignore all the other +s and –s and collaborative work would come out of on top because of mood effects alone.

