A recent research on professional chess players suggest that we do make more mistakes when working from home.
When the Covid-19 pandemic forced many workers to go remote, managers fretted about possible declines in productivity. More than two years later, studies suggest that their fears were largely unfounded. But what about remote workers’ cognitive performance? To investigate, a research team turned to an unusual empirical setting: professional chess.
The researchers analyzed a set of online tournaments organized during the pandemic by the reigning world champion, Magnus Carlsen, which were structured to mirror traditional offline contests. Because most participants had competed in at least one recent World Chess Federation tournament, the researchers were able to compare individuals’ online and in-person performances, using the AI in a leading chess engine to assess more than 200,000 moves and associated errors. They found that the quality of play was 7.5% lower, on average, when participants competed online. Although the researchers couldn’t determine why that happened, they say that the absence of peers probably contributed.
"Cognitive tasks are important in many modern professional, managerial, technical, and creative occupations," the researchers note, and so performance in other remote settings might likewise take a hit. However, the decline in chess players’ performance was steepest in the first two tournaments.
You can read the full research here: Cognitive Performance in Remote Work: Evidence from Professional Chess
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