Comments on: Group IQ

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 18:57:57 +0000

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

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 18:55:46 +0000

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.

By: David Foster

David Foster — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 14:30:57 +0000

“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.

By: Johnny Abacus

Johnny Abacus — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 01:37:57 +0000

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).