A paper published in the journal Science, co-authored by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, and Union College, provides new evidence that a series of factors influence thelevel of collective intelligence exhibited by a group:
The researchers conducted studies at MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence and Carnegie Mellon, in which 699 people were placed in groups of two to five. The groups worked together on tasks that ranged from visual puzzles to negotiations, brainstorming, games and complex rule-based design assignments. The researchers concluded that a group’s collective intelligence accounted for about 40 percent of the variation in performance on this wide range of tasks.
So what did the performance variation look like?
That collective intelligence, the researchers believe, stems from how well the group works together. For instance, groups whose members had higher levels of “social sensitivity” were more collectively intelligent. “Social sensitivity has to do with how well group members perceive each other’s emotions,” says Christopher Chabris, a co-author and assistant professor of psychology at Union College in New York. “Also, in groups where one person dominated, the group was less collectively intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed,” adds Woolley. And teams containing more women demonstrated greater social sensitivity and in turn greater collective intelligence compared to teams containing fewer women.
MIT News: Putting Heads Together
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