Groups produce collective intelligence, study says
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A study by Anita Williams Woolley and her colleagues found "collective intelligence" valuable.
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America is a cowboy nation.
We love the lone hero who rides in to save the town, whether he is a charismatic CEO, a dynamic political leader or a brilliant scientist.
But in today's society, says Carnegie Mellon University professor Anita Williams Woolley, the most valuable kind of smarts may be group IQ, or what she calls "collective intelligence."
In an October study published in Science magazine, Dr. Woolley and her colleagues showed that when they randomly assembled groups of two to five people in Boston and Pittsburgh and gave them a set of intellectually challenging tasks, the groups showed markedly different levels of collective intelligence.
The groups were given a wide range of tests -- brainstorming how many uses a brick could have, for instance, or solving a tough puzzle or collaborating to jointly type a large chunk of text into a shared document.
The group members were also given individual IQ tests, which showed they represented the same range as a typical adult population.
Surprisingly to Dr. Woolley, the average IQ of a group had almost no impact on its collective intelligence. It also didn't matter whether a group had one high-IQ individual.
There were three factors that did make a difference, though.
One was the social sensitivity of group members -- how much they paid attention to each other and asked questions.
The second was turn-taking. Groups that shared the floor had much better results. "When you had someone really dominating the conversations in these groups, the group did not perform well," she said.
Finally, in general, the more women in a group, the smarter it was.
As they analyzed that result, she said, it didn't mean the women had higher IQs than the men, but that they were more socially sensitive and less likely to dominate discussions.
Asked whether a simple way of boosting group performance would be to set a minimum quota for female members, Dr. Woolley laughed.
"I wouldn't advocate that because all of us know counterexamples to the general rule that women are more socially sensitive."
Dr. Woolley speculated that one particularly important behavior that many women display is the willingness to admit what they don't know, and ask if anyone else in the group has better expertise.
First Published January 10, 2011 12:00 am
