Anita Williams Woolley , Performance of Human Groups

Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups.

Psychologists have repeatedly shown that a single statistical factor--often called "general intelligence"--emerges from the correlations among people's performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. But no one has systematically examined whether a similar kind of "collective intelligence" exists for groups of people. In two studies with 699 people, working in groups of two to five, we find c...

Don’t talk about it: Active avoidance in organizations

Collective Intelligence in League of Legends Teams_To Submit

Are some teams characteristically smarter than others? Research on both face-to-face and online teams suggests that the answer is "yes." In recent work, we found that teams exhibited a characteristic level of collective intelligence, manifest in their performance across a wide range of tasks and that this measure of collective intelligence predicted future performance on more complex tasks , (E...

Gender diversity leads to better science

OPINION Correction for “Opinion: Gender diversity leads to better science,” by Mathias Wullum Nielsen, Sharla Alegria, Love Börjeson, Henry Etzkowitz, Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski, Aparna Joshi, Erin Leahey, Laurel Smith-Doerr, Anita Williams Woolley, and Londa Schiebinger, which appeared in issue 8, February 21, 2017, of Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (114:1740–1742; 10.1073/pnas.1700616114). The editors ...

Means vs. Ends: Implications of Process and Outcome Focus for Team Adaptation and Performance

To reap the value in diverse teams, leaders may try to manipulate structuralinterdependence – through task design – to foster synergistic collaboration. However, ambiguityabout the nature and appropriate intersections of members’ unique and valuable cognitiveperspectives can make it difficult to fully anticipate collaborative activity in task design. Here,teams need emergent...