The IQ of a Team

Monday, March 8th, 2010

What happens when you test the IQ of a team? Robert Gordon’s Everyday Life as an Intelligence Test explains:

Consider an experiment by Laughlin and Johnson (1966) that induced the local equivalent of random pairing. College students were administered the high level Tern-ran Concept Mastery Test (Tern-ran, 1956) and then assigned to low, medium, and high ability groups according to their scores. Students were paired up systematically to represent every combination of the three ability levels and readministered the same test working together, but some members of each level were left to repeat the test alone.

Working with lower ability partners led generally to score improvements, but the more able the partner the greater was the gain. For present purposes, the most telling finding was that medium and high ability individuals improved slightly more working alone the second time than working with low ability partners. As these were college students, and the test was a difficult one, the low group would have scored well above many persons in the general population.

Medium and high ability individuals improved slightly more working alone the second time than working with low ability partners.

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