But we suspect that technology may allow a group to get smarter as it goes from 10 people to 50 to 500 or even 5,000. That suggests size could diminish group intelligence. But as face-to-face groups get bigger, they’re less able to take advantage of their members. Malone: Families, companies, and cities all have collective intelligence. So this phenomenon could extend beyond the small groups you studied? Consistent performance across disparate areas of functioning suggests an organizational collective intelligence, which could be used to predict company performance. Some companies that do well at scanning the environment and setting targets also excel at managing internal operations and mentoring employees-and have better financial performance. Woolley: There is some evidence to suggest that collective intelligence exists at the organizational level, too. You could increase it by changing members or incentives for collaboration, for instance. Though you can change an individual’s intelligence only so much, we think it’s completely possible to markedly change a group’s intelligence. Malone: We hope to look at that in the future. We’re hopeful that this work can create a similar seismic shift in how we study groups. Woolley: There was a step change in psychology once the field had an empirical method of measuring individual intelligence through IQ tests. We realized that intelligence tests are a way to predict individuals’ performance on a range of tasks, but no one had thought of using the same approach to predict group performance. Our study shows it with intellectual tasks. In some ways, your findings seem blindingly obvious: that teams are more than just a collection of the best talent. Extremely homogeneous or extremely diverse groups aren’t as intelligent. Our ongoing research suggests that teams need a moderate level of cognitive diversity for effectiveness. Woolley: Anecdotally, we know that groups can become too internally focused. And in our study we saw pretty clearly that groups that had smart people dominating the conversation were not very intelligent groups.Ĭan teams be too group oriented? Everyone is so socially sensitive that there’s no leader? What do you hear about great groups? Not that the members are all really smart but that they listen to each other. Woolley: In theory, yes, the 10 smartest people could make the smartest group, but it wouldn’t be just because they were the most intelligent individuals. In theory the 10 smartest people could still make a great group, right? So you didn’t see a negative correlation with individual IQs-just a very weak positive correlation. So what is really important is to have people who are high in social sensitivity, whether they are men or women. Many studies have shown that women tend to score higher on tests of social sensitivity than men do. It’s just that part of that finding can be explained by differences in social sensitivity, which we found is also important to group performance. And you can tell I’m hesitating a little. You realize you’re saying that groups of women are smarter than groups of men. Woolley: We have early evidence that performance may flatten out at the extreme end-that there should be a little gender diversity rather than all women. But so far, the data show, the more women, the better. The standard argument is that diversity is good and you should have both men and women in a group. Malone: It’s a preliminary finding-and not a conventional one. So we were surprised but intrigued to find that group intelligence had relatively little to do with individual intelligence. Malone: Before we did the research, we were afraid that collective intelligence would be just the average of all the individual IQs in a group. Group intelligence had little to do with individual intelligence. Many factors you might think would be predictive of group performance were not.
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