Collective Intelligence

Methodology

• Two studies in which 699 people were placed in groups of two to five and worked on tasks that ranged from visual puzzles to negotiations, brainstorming, games and complex rule-based design assignments.

Key Findings

• Groups demonstrate distinctive ‘collective intelligence’ when facing difficult tasks
• Groups featuring the right kind of internal dynamics perform well on a wide range of assignments
• Groups whose members had higher levels of “social sensitivity” — the willingness of the group to let all its members take turns and apply their skills to a given challenge — were more collectively intelligent.
• The ability of members to read the facial expressions in others and make attributions about what they are thinking and feeling was significantly related to collective intelligence
• In groups where one person dominated, the group was less collectively intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed
• The researchers concluded that a group’s collective intelligence accounted for about 30 to 40 percent of the variation in performance.