Collective Intelligence Is Higher in Groups

A team of investigators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has shown that when it comes to intelligence, the whole is indeed more than the sum of the parts.

This is especially true for groups, which display levels of collective intelligence that cannot be explained by adding up the amount of intelligence present in the group's members.

A special category within these groups is those who cooperate extremely well. In these groups, the aforementioned correlation is even more clearly visible.

One of the more peculiar conclusions that the new study arrived at was that the tendency to cooperate effectively within a group is linked directly to the number of women in that group.

“We did not know if groups would show a general cognitive ability across tasks. But we found that there is a general effectiveness, a group collective intelligence, which predicts a group’s performance in a lot of situations,” says expert Thomas W. Malone.

He is one of the authors of a new paper detailing the findings, which is published in the September 30 advance online issue of the esteemed journal Science.

Malone is also the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management in the MIT Sloan School of Management. He says that the new findings could have very important applications for organizing businesses and other endeavors.

Another conclusion of the work was that the correlations appeared to be valid only when the correct kind of group dynamics was considered. When this condition was met, the team did well on a wide array of assignments.

The amount of cooperation in the group was critical to the success of the team. Groups that did best were those whose members had the highest degrees of social sensitivity.

This concept can basically be translated as the willingness of the group to let all its members take turns and apply their skills to a given challenge

“Social sensitivity has to do with how well group members perceive each other’s emotions. In groups where one person dominated, the group was less intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed,” Malone reveals.

“What our results indicate is that people with social skills are good for a group – whether they are male or female,” the expert concludes.