Not As Smart As We Think: A Study of Collective Intelligence in Virtual Groups

Cross-disciplinary research on collective intelligence considers that groups, like individuals, have a certain level of intelligence. For example, the study by Woolley et al. (2010) indicates that groups which perform well on one type of task will perform well on others. In a pair of empirical studies of groups interacting face-to-face, they found evidence of a collective intelligence factor, a measure of consistent group performance across a series of tasks, which was highly predictive of performance on a subsequent, more complex task. This collective intelligence factor differed from the individual intelligence of group members, and was significantly predicted by members’ social sensitivity – the ability to understand the emotions of others based on visual facial cues (Baron-Cohen et al. 2001).