Group IQ

Friday, January 7th, 2011

Group IQ, according to a study out of MIT’s Sloan school, has less to do with the group’s average IQ than you might expect:

In two studies, researchers divided 699 people into groups of two to five people. They measured each team member’s intelligence individually, but then gave the teams intelligence-testing tasks to solve — figuring out the next pattern in a sequence, brainstorming the different potential uses of a brick. Then, the group performed a more complex “criterion” task, such as playing checkers against a computer or completing a complicated architectural task with Legos, which was used to understand whether the collective intelligence researchers measured in the initial tasks correctly predicted the group’s abilities.

What the researchers found was that groups’ collective intelligence strongly predicted how well they did in the computer checkers game and on the Legos task — evidence that something called “collective intelligence” did in fact exist. What was more surprising, however, was that neither the average intelligence of the group members nor the person with the greatest intelligence strongly predicted how well the group did.

Other tenets of group success also seemed to fall by the wayside: A group’s motivation, satisfaction, and unity were unimportant. Instead, the researchers found that when a group had a high level of collective intelligence, the members tended to score well on a test that measured how good they were at reading other people’s emotions. They also found that groups with overbearing leaders who were reluctant to cede the floor and let the others talk did worse than those in which participation was better distributed and people took turns speaking. And they also found that the proportion of women in the group was a predictor of collective intelligence — a factor they believe was likely influenced by women’s generally superior social sensitivity.

Comments

  1. Johnny Abacus says:

    It sounds like they are really talking about group dysfunction.

    Two things I’d like to see:

    1. The subjects run through the tasks individually. I suspect that the average individual score will be higher than the average group score.

    2. The groups asked to do really hard tasks — the last 10% of raven’s progressive matrices, for example. I suspect that, to do well in such a task, IQ is necessary but not sufficient (i.e. well functioning groups are not smarter than their members).

  2. David Foster says:

    “Intuitively, we still attribute too much to individuals and not enough to groups. Part of that may just be that it’s simpler; it’s simpler to say the success of a company depended on the CEO for good or bad, but in reality the success of a company depends on a whole lot more,” said Tom Malone.

    This is a little simplistic. Few knowledgeable people think the reason the company’s success depends on the CEO is because he makes all the decisions himself; rather, the CEO hires people, who in turn hire other people, who sent the tone and the way things are done, which does indeed have a great deal to do with the collective intelligence of the group.

    There are of course long time-lags in this process: at GE, for example, the kind of culture that Jack Welch built surely still has a huge impact on what his successor Jeff Immelt is and is not able to accomplish, a decade later.

  3. Isegoria says:

    Ideally, the group would get any question right if anyone in the group got it right. So, the best group score would come from a diverse group that could recognize when someone had the right answer — either because everyone had a clear area of expertise, or because the answers were easy to verify, as with many brain-teasers. The worst group score would come from like-minded individuals who all thought they knew more than everyone else about everything — like, say, a group of young MBAs.

  4. Isegoria says:

    The executive’s job is made especially challenging by the way he’s fed information from not-so-impartial sources.

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