Collective intelligence can be more important than individual smarts, a recent study shows. In other words, having a bunch of smart people in a group doesn’t necessarily make for a smart team.

Most of us have witnessed, or been part of, groups of smart people who simply cannot work well together. According to a recent study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon and Union College, this occurs because individual smarts don’t have much to do with team performance.

The paper, recently published in the journal Science, documents the existence of collective intelligence among groups of people who cooperate well, showing that such intelligence extends beyond the cognitive abilities of the groups’ individual members.

“[W]e found that there is a general effectiveness, a group collective intelligence, which predicts a group’s performance in a lot of situations,” Thomas W. Malone, the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of the paper, said.

Whereas prior research on groups has focused on the ability to complete a single task, Malone and his colleagues wanted to determine whether the performance of the group could be predicted over a series of many different tasks — a group IQ of sorts — and understand what factors influence the collective intelligence of the group.

In experiments with 699 people, participants were split into teams ranging from two to five people and asked to do a variety of problem-solving tasks, ranging from visual puzzles, brainstorming, making collective moral judgments and constructing a building from LEGO bricks. The researchers concluded that a group’s collective intelligence accounted for about 40 percent of the variation in performance on this wide range of tasks.

Moreover, the researchers found that the performances of groups were not primarily due to the individual abilities of the group members. To determine this, many of the participants also performed similar tasks individually. The average and maximum intelligence of individuals did not significantly predict the performance of their groups.

In other words, as Malone put it: “Having a bunch of smart people in a group doesn’t necessarily make the group smart.”

In fact, when it comes to results, group traits can be more important than traits of the individuals making up the group, according to the study.

“It turns out that the collective intelligence of the team will only meet or exceed its individual potential if the right kind of internal dynamics are in place,” social psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson writes at Psychology Today’s The Science of Success blog.

Collective intelligence stems from how well the group works together, the researchers believe.

In groups where one person dominated, for instance, “the group was less collectively intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed,” according to Anita Williams Woolley, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business and the paper’s lead author.

Groups in which individuals had higher “social sensitivity” were also found to be more successful.

“Social sensitivity has to do with how well group members perceive each other’s emotions,” Christopher Chabris, an assistant professor of psychology at Union College and a co-author of the report, explained. Social sensitivity was measured prior to the tasks by assessing each participant’s ability to read the emotion in photographs showing only the eyes of the subject.

Interestingly, when analyzing the data, the co-authors found that teams containing more women demonstrated greater social sensitivity, and in turn collective intelligence, compared with teams containing fewer women during the tests.

“We didn’t design this study to focus on the gender effect,” Malone said. “That was a surprise to us.”

Nevertheless, further analysis revealed that the effect stemmed from the higher social sensitivity exhibited by females, on average. “So having group members with higher social sensitivity is better regardless of whether they are male or female,” Woolley explained.

The researchers believe their findings apply to many kinds of businesses and organizations.

“Imagine if you could give a one-hour test to a top management team or a product development team that would allow you to predict how flexibly that group of people would respond to a wide range of problems that might arise,” Malone said. “That would be a pretty interesting application. We also think it’s possible to improve the intelligence of a group by changing the members of a group, teaching them better ways of interacting or giving them better electronic collaboration tools.”

“What individuals can do all by themselves is becoming less important; what matters more is what they can do with others and by using technology,” Woolley concluded.

Resources

Image: ©iStockphoto.com/aluxum

Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups
by Anita Williams Woolley, Christopher Chabris, Alex Pentland, Nada Hashmi and Thomas W. Malone
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), Oct. 29, 2010 (Vol. 330 No. 6004)

Putting Heads Together
by Peter Dizikes
MIT News, Oct. 1, 2010

…Collective Intelligence of Groups Exceeds Cognitive Abilities of Individual Group Members
Carnegie Mellon, Oct. 1, 2010

What Makes a Group Smart
Union College, Oct. 11, 2010

Many Heads Can Be Better than One, if They Belong to Women
by Heidi Grant Halvorson
The Science of Success (Psychology Today), April 7, 2011

You’re Smart, They’re Smart, It Didn’t Work
by Cathleen F. Crowley
Times Union, Oct. 11, 2010