Collective intelligence: What allows a group of ordinary people to beat one genius?
What is collective intelligence?
There is the saying “two heads are better than one”, but what is interesting about human society is that 1 + 1 can sometimes equal more than two.
Having people with different skills and personalities work together can at times create an excellent team as though a chemical reaction had occurred. The problem solving skills that such teams possess is known as “collective intelligence.”
We all have different degrees and types of intelligence, but in that case, what factors could affect the level of collective intelligence?
What are the six elements that affect collective intelligence?
The paper I discuss today is a review article summarizing research into collective intelligence.
As the main factors that influence collective intelligence, the paper gives:
- the members’ ability to read what each other is thinking, which can be measured with the Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RME) test;
- including women to a certain extent, which the paper suggests could be related to their innate ability to read what others are thinking;
- working face-to-face together, rather than online;
- having an appropriate level of diversity among the members, but the performance curve has an inverted U-shape, where too much diversity reduces performance instead, so an appropriate level of diversity is important;
- an environment where members have equal standing and can communicate easily; and
- no member exhibits excessive leadership,
among others, and states that these are important based on various empirical studies.
Some business books write about leadership without leaders and similar concepts, but I wondered whether this referred to the six phenomena above, and whether the reason that groups of highly intelligent people do not function well is because of problems with 1 and 3.
It is also well known that generally, no matter how superior the company, over time its organization will decline and its business performance will deteriorate.
Could it be that collective intelligence falters because class systems arise naturally because humans follow their sociality as time passes and group together with similar people, which reduces diversity, and finally taboos develop and communication is hampered, leading to the failure of the six conditions above?
